wanderingstan

In August 2008 my old laptop bit the dust. Everyone was raving about Macs and I saw some good developers using them. This, and the fact I was such an Apple fanboy in my youth, convinced me that it was time for this prodigal Mac son to come home. I bought an almost-new MacBook off Craigslist–which later turned out to be stolen. But that’s another story. (But interesting to note that New York police aren’t interested if you call tell them you think you have a stolen laptop.) I was immediately disappointed. And as I now knew it was hot, I couldn’t in good conscience resell it.

So for the past year I’ve kept a list where I express my frustration every time it slows me down. At the behest of many, I now present that list. (Please note that this list is compiled from moments of extreme frustration over many months. I’m generally a happy person!)

Overall User Interface

1. The menu bar on the Mac makes no sense. It is based on 1984 technology when only one program ran at a time, so every window on the screen belonged to the same program. This approach is ridiculous today when it’s not uncommon to have 15 or more programs running at once, each with several windows, spread across a multiple monitors. For example, I keep Skype and Adium windows open on the far right of my external monitor. To edit a Skype setting, I must navigate to the opposite side of the desktop, across two entire screen widths, just to reach a menu option.

For example, consider how Apple might improve a basic kitchen setup, where they’ve heard complaints of people not knowing where to find controls for their appliances.

That’s right: the controls for every kitchen appliance should really be in one place –no matter how far from the actual appliance– so that people always know where to find them!

(It’s hard to tell in this picture, but those dials are actually changing the microwave (to left of the picture), since thats the last appliance the chef touched. A small line of 12-point text explains which appliance is currently being controlled. It’s so intuitive, and the extra steps to walk across the kitchen are a small price to pay for always knowing where your controls are!)

2. Menu actions take effect on the “topmost” window of an application, but in an age of multiple screens, this is often ambiguous. If I have two screens, and each screen has a window sitting on top, which window is the one I’m operating on?

3. Ghost programs. Program can be running but with no windows, existing only as menu bar. Furthermore, when no windows for an app are open, you get the nonsense situation where many menu actions (E.g. “New Folder” in finder) make no sense at all.

4. Confusing situations when menu bar of window-less app is showing over window of other program. The natural instinct is to think that the menu bar relates to the window which is filling the screen, but the interface leads you astray.

5. No copy-n-paste from calculator widget or dictionary, or any widgets. Just today I needed to calculate the number of seconds in 2 years. It was easy to do use the Mac calculator and even get the answer: 63,072,000. But it is impossible to copy that answer into my file. Not only that, but it is also impossible to look at the calculator to transcribe the answer! The only solution is to write the answer down with a pen, or two flip back and forth to insure you remembered it correctly. Glad to have a $2K laptop for this. (See here for more info)

6. Undraggable. It is impossible to drag something (like a file from Finder) to an application which is not currently visible. You must carefully arrange windows ahead of time so that both are visible.  In Windows. you can drag to a program in the task bar, which then will bring that application window to the front. (Furthermore, in Windows when you drag to the task bar, you can even select from multiple windows of the application.)

7. The only hint that application is running is a few glowing pixels below it.

8. Impossible to perform a double-click and drag (or triple-click and drag) from the touchpad without using the button.

9. No Home or End Keys on Keyboard. Now before you start screaming about using Command-left and Command-right, simmer down and listen for second. The problem is these combinations don’t always work as Home/End, and this inconsistency is enough to make them useless. E.g. in Firefox, Command-left/right are also the shortcuts for navigating forward back/back pages. In Entourage Command-left/right means to jump forward or back by a word, not the entire line. In Terminal Command-left/right means to switch between windows. In Adium Command-left/right switches between Tabs. And in Google Docs, those key combinations don’t do anything at all. It is up to every program to decide if they will offer this super-duper feature, and to decide what key combination to assign. In Entourage, it’s Function-left/right. In the built-in Terminal program, you can only use the oh-so-intuitive Ctrl-A or Ctrl-E.

10. Lack of error reporting overall. E.g. No way to know when you have mis-configured exchange in address book and iSync. If you do enter password or any setting wrong, it just does nothing.

11. Multiple confusing ways of installing applications. Disk images, install programs, disk images with “drag this” instruction pages, install programs on disk images, Stuffit archives, Stuffit archives of installers, and god knows how many other permutations. All I know is that I always end up with disk images left over all over the place. And by the way, it is not at all intuitive that within a “disk image” you should have to drag one icon (”the app”) to another icon (”applications”) in order to install a program on your laptop. Sometime try explaining this technique to your parents or a non-technical peer sometime.

12. Can’t navigate buttons in dialog box with arrow keys (e.g. switching between “ok” and “cancel”) CORRECTION: You can, but have to turn this option on. (Learn how here.)

13. Can’t access dialog elements with keyboard shortcuts. Must use the Mouse or Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab to get around. Ridiculously slow way of navigating complex dialog boxes that you must use often. (E.g. The Find/Replace box in Eclipse.) In contrast, Windows dialogs may be quickly navigated by pressing Alt in combination of the underlined letter of the field.

14. Many (most?) lists cannot be navigated with arrow keys. Again you are forced to use the damn mouse for a task where keys are much better. The frustrating thing here is that works in some applications.

Want to go through a list of 500 fonts? Yep, you gotta click on each one in turn, and don’t forget to play with the little scroll bar to move new items into view. Ugh.

15. No auto-resize of columns. You can’t double-click a heading divider boundary (e.g. in a list of files) to have it expand to show all items. E.g. in Finder when a column is too narrow, you should be able to double-click the column divider which expands it big enough to show all data in the rows. In Mac you have to drag the column manually, which sometime means also having to re-size the window first. It should also remember the size when you change it.

16. Lack of OK and Cancel buttons in preference boxes. No way to undo when you know you messed up some setting but don’t remember how it was. For example, when I was midway through changing email settings and then realized I was editing the wrong account. Oops! No way to get back the values I’d changed. And in any case, merely clicking the close button just feels wrong, and trains people the wrong way. (This is not the right behavior when editing a spreadsheet or document, for example!)

18. Minimizing creates confusing flow. Minimizing window takes it completely out of alt-tab cycle. it appears only unreadable thumbnail. No way to minimize a window just to see window below. More on this later.

19. No universal keyboard shortcuts.  Every menu bar option in Windows interface is accessible via the Alt key. On Mac, if menu has no defined keyboard shortcut, you’re SOL unless you take the time to manually add one. Correction:  It is possible (learned about it here), but combination is l-o-n-g: FN-CNTRL-F2, letters of menu, down-arrow, letters of command, ENTER. For example, in Firefox let’s set the Zoom option to “text only”:

• Windows: ALT-V, Z, T
• Mac: CTRL-FUNCTION-F2, V, ENTER, Z, ENTER, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, ENTER.

20. Font bluring is lame. Kindofa  preference, but small fonts are still more readable under windows. MS smooths fonts to pixel boundaries, so small fonts look readable. No luck on mac. See here and here.

21. Zoom/Maximize button is absolutely ridiculous, as is the whole stoplight analogy. In iTunes, the “+” button actaully shrinks the window. In Finder, the behaviour is completely random, other programs expand to only most of the screen. This is a long-standing problem that many have complained about.

22. Confusing situation with programs that exist only as icons on menu bar. E.g. Mozy: Sometimes it shows a modal dialog box, but this box doesn’t show up in the Command-tab flow, nor does it show up in Exposé.  And yet, the program is halted (and all menu items disabled) waiting for my response. For months I thought the program had crashed and force-killed it.  One day with relatively few programs running I accidentally noticed the dialog box hiding there under all the other windows.

Browser

24. No icons for shortcuts in browser. Note that they actually removed this feature. I thought macs were about being graphical? Back in 1984 Apple was explaining “icons” to the world and how useful they were.  But now they’ve decided that shiny interfaces look better without your icons messing it up the vibe. You’re stuck with text.

Here is my browser toolbar in Windows:

And here it is on the Mac:

Instead of 19 shortcuts that I can identify immediately from an icon, I have 9 shortcuts that I have to parse as text. Blah. (Happy to note that Google Chrome for Mac, released for Mac last week, does show icons.)

25. Strange browser  tab UI: why does the tab connect upward to the favorites bar? This makes no physical sense.

Call me old fashioned, but I have seen actual physical folders existing in the real world. Yes they do exist. And in my memory, they look something like the image below. Observe the fine detail of how the folder title is connected to the folder itself.

Apple engineers are smart, but I think they remember folders working a little differently than I do. Or perhaps they grew up somewhere that used a different kind of folders? Ones that looked more like this, perhaps:

For example, here’s how tabs are shown in Safari:

(Again, Google Chrome for Mac gets this right.)

Finder and Files

26. No option to Cut files in Finder, only Copy.  A pain when trying to move a large number of hand-picked files to a new location. Again, you’re forced to mess with the mouse and multiple windows and dragging: the only way to copy files is to open and strategically arrange two finder instances. And really, why did they bother to implement “Copy” if they had no intention to implement Cut?

27. Renaming files only possible from time-consuming mouse gesture. “Rename” is not a possible action from the right-click menu. Nor is there any keyboard shortcut. Nor is there a menu option.  Nor is there an entry in a help file somewhere. One must just know that the correct action is “click-once and wait 2 seconds”.

28. No* way to copy-n-paste your current path. So frustrating when you can see it in window title!  (This guy is amazed to discover that this is useful )

*Correction! It can be done by following these simple steps:

• Select a file
• Go to finder menu
• Select “services” submenu
• Now select “textedit” submenu
• Now select “New window containing selection”
• Wait this for app to load
• Press Command-A to select-all
• Press Command-C to copy
• Close the textedit application.
• And now you have the path copied! Wasnt’ that easy and fun?!

As a general note, on the Mac I find myself writing down or trying to memorize long paths all the frickin time. So sick of this.

29. Mac Laptops cannot perform a right-click-and-drag, as they have no physical right button. (In Windows explorer, this allows you to drag files and then specify whether they will be copied or moved. Other programs use right-drag in other ways.)

30. Can’t search external drives. I have an external hard disk with many gigabytes of music in a folder called “Music”, sorted into many subfolders. I plug it in, try to do a search for “gabriel”. But guess what? I ask the impossible!! Yep, this powerful Mac can only look for files that it has pre-indexed.  How friggin retarded is this? Earth to Apple: finding files should not be a problem for a GUI in the 21st century. (Note: some have suggested that this is because the drive was formatted for Fat32. But (1) that’s still no excuse for inability to do a simple file search and (2) if that is so, a message saying “I can’t do that” would be preferable to saying “Zero items found.”)

(More on Mac Search Suckage)

31. “Move to Trash” is confusing. First word of menu is “move”, and “moving” files is not what you’re thinking of. Minor, but annoying.

32. Right click doesn’t show all available options available on the target. You just have to know that some things are in the right click menu, some things you have to find in the menu bar, and some things are only available as mouse gestures.

33. Cannot permanently delete an individual file. (See this applescript hack.) In Windows this magical feat is accomplished by holding the Shift key while deleting. (See here)

34. Can’t right-click file to email it. Not even a menu option. You must open a mail program, and navigate the file system to re-find the file which you have sitting right there in front of you.

35. Can’t right-click file to print it. Not even a menu option. Again.

35. Apple’s Mail Application is always default for sending mail. Preview has a handy menu item, “Mail Image.” Too bad Apple decided that the only mail application you can use is their own built-in Mail. Thanks Apple! Even more bizarre, Apple does let you change your default email reader. (See here) So, you may read emails in any app you like, but you are expected to send all your email from Apple’s. Great. Awe-some. (Microsoft pulls this kind of crap too, of course. But for at least the last five years you’ve been able to change your default email program.)

36. No shell extensions. Finder has only a few feeble means to be extended, so there is nothing like Tortoise, or “open-command-line here”, or resize images, or 7zip compression.

37. Impossible to move mp3s from Documents to Music folder. Finder always wants to copy. No way to force it to just move, without going to command line.

Open/Save Dialogs

38. Open/Save Dialogs suck big time. From an Open/Save dialog, you can’t re-name an incorrectly named new folder, or move an incorrectly placed new folder. One wrong bit of typing, and the only way to fix it is (yet again) to open a finder window and navigate your way through the file system back to where you already are in the dialog.

39. Can’t add columns of info when opening files. E.g. when trying to upload photos to Wordpress, the “Open File” dialog box shows only “Name” and “Last Modified”, but what I really need to know is the size of each file. However, there is no way to show this information. Only way is to select “Get Info…” on each and every file. One. At. A. Time. Argh! Other useful categories include “Date Created”, “Resolution”, “Song Length”, etc… (And of course, there is also no way to jump from the dialog to Finder, as a simple “Explore Here” option in Windows will do.) See here.

40. Doesn’t remember your selected files when switching views. For example, in Icon mode you start Command-clicking a few thumbnails of files to upload. Then you need to switch to list view to check a date. (See above.) Well, thank goodness that clicking lots of little file names is so much fun, because after switching views you get to do it all over again! Hope you remembered them all!!

41. Can’t perform common operations in a dialog. For example, to preview or resize images before uploading, or compress large files before emailing, or rename, whatever…

Look at what happens when you right-click a file in an Open/Save dialog in Windows:

Behold! The amazing ability to manipulate files when you see them! And lo, even to rename, compress, or re-size them as needed before emailing. Behold! The amazing ability to see the sizes of more than one file at a time! What terrible genius dwells in Redmond that gives Windows XP such truly awesome and fearful powers?!

42. Not extensible, e.g. no revision information. Mac does not allow extension of how files are represented, which means tools like Tortoise simply cannot exist. If you’ve never used it, you don’t know how much time you’ve wasted by not seeing at-a-glance which files have been changed in your repository from any program, not just an IDE.

For example, if I’m editing some images in Photoshop or whatever, I wonder which one of these files has been modified since the last commit?

In Windows the task is a teensy bit easier, as you can see.

The main point is not so much to sing the praises of Tortoise (which is a great program) put to point out that Mac OSX cannot be improved, cannot have better tools, since it cannot extended.

43. Thumbnails are tiny, and no way to preview at full size; the tiny icon thumbnails are tiny and un-reiszable and only can be seen in impractible icon view. Nor can you right-click to preview the file. (See below.) For good measure, Files can only be viewed in alphabetical order when you are in icon view.

Quick: Can you spot which of these thumbnails is different?

Here is the same dialog box in Windows. Woa, look at the size of those thumbnails!! It’s like you might actually be able to see what’s in the picture. And lo and behold, what’s that?? With a mere right-click, you can actually preview the image full-size if you like. Or rotate it, or resize it. All this, and you don’t even have to write down the path on a scrap of paper so you can re-navigate to the file in Photoshop.

And speaking of Photoshop. Is it any wonder that Adobe ditches the usual Mac open/save dialog box and replaces it with it’s own, which looks remarkably like Windows?

44. Impossible to open hidden files from an “open file” dialog box. For example, today in an emergency I needed to upload a “.htaccess” file via a web interface. It was impossible to so. The time-consuming workaround was to rename the file locally to remove the ‘.’, uploading it, then renaming it back both locally and on the server. Ugh. See full description here. (And again, it is impossible to rename the file from within the upload window, so I had to open an instance of Finder and re-navigate to the obscure directory that I was currently working in.)

45. Interface inconsistencies. Hitting “Enter” to open a file works in an “Open” dialog box, but not in Finder where opening is “Command-O” and enter means “Rename”.

46. When typing file name in “Save Dialog”, it doesn’t auto-complete with existing filenames. Sucks when you have a long file naming pattern that you want followed. (E.g. printing PDF’s of everything for my Berlin Trip.)

Applications and Windows

47. Alt-tab only goes through applications, not windows. This small difference makes a huge negative impact on power users. Takes longer and is more complicated to find an old window that you need. To illustrate, I mapped out the routine that I and other power users go through hundreds of times a day: Switching from one window to another using the keyboard.

48. Alt-` has behavior that is completely different from Command-Tab: Alt-` is used to switch to windows within an application. However, instead of returning to the last window used (as Command-Tab does with applications), it cycles through all windows in order. So if you have 20 windows open in an app (not unheard of to have that many open in preview or terminal) then you would have to hit Alt-` 19 times to get back to the window you were just on! Just today I was trying to copy bits of a webpage in one browser window into a blog compostion in another window. Unlucky for me, I had 5 other browser windows open. So each back-and-forth required hitting Alt-` 5 times, and running completely counter to Command-Tab behavior we’re all accustomed to.

49. Alt-` brings all other windows to the front. E.g. in phpMyAdmin, trying to cycle between an “Edit SQL” window and the underlying results (so you can compare your query and the results side by side) is impossible if you have any other brower windows open. (Same thing when in Entourage you’re trying to keep the main window open in background while edited an email — impossible if you have any other email windows floating around, because they always come to the top also when you hit Alt-`)

50. Weird side effects with unwanted windows coming to the top. E.g. if multiple terminal windows are open, and you need to read info in browser while typing in ONE of them, all of them will appear, covering your browser. Example: In browser, click to download a pdf file or something. It loads in preview, you take a look, and then you close it. Of course, you’d exepect to be back in the browser where you were. But no! Because now that you are in Preview, all the other random preview windows have now come to the top. Confusing! It’s as if you’re working in the kitchen and take out a screwdriver to fix a loose door, but when you set the screwdriver down, suddenly you are surrounded by everything from the garage that you recently used a screwdriver on.

51. Exposé is not a substitute. A lot of Mac people don’t get this, so let me say it again: If you are working fast, you do not want to mess with a mouse. And if you are really doing a lot of work, you’re going to have a ton of windows open and then they all look the same. Can you tell the difference between a pdf, Word, and blog version of the same document at this scale?

52. Tools like Wich try to cover this limitation, but bog down if you have too many windows. (Wich would slow to 5-10 seconds when tabbing between 20 windows.)

Missing Tools

53. No Tortoise. SCplugin is nowhere close. And the true lack of shell extensions means that it can *never* work in Open/Save dialogs like Tortoise does.

54. No good NetDrive equivalent.  (Mapping FTP to the file system.) MacFusion is buggy as hell, and even when working, takes several *minutes* to work on folders with sizable number of files.

Physical Defects

55. Always plays the startup sound even if volume was turned off and *even if headphones are plugged in*. In other words if you have to re-start your laptop while in a meeting, there is NO WAY to avoid blasting the room with that sound and looking like an idiot.

56. Bad ergonomics of Macbook: keyboard too close to screen, too far from front edge. This puts sharp corner of edge directly on the wrist.

57. Limited Screen Tilt. Screen only reclines to about a 60 degree angle. Thus making it impossible for even slightly tallish people to ergonomically position their hands at the keyboard without  hunching their back to view the screen. (Elbows should be bent nearly at 90 degrees, with forearms level to the floor. See here. )

58.Keyboard and surface are completely flat so very uncomfortable to type on with sharp edges that your wrist rests on.  (I guess this is why so many mac users use those little tilt gadgets to increase the angle?)

59. Goddam a MacBook Pro gets hot! Could burn my left knee to a crisp.

60. No equivalent of right-click key on keyboard.  (Windows has a key on right side of space bar.) Again, you are always forced back to the mouse, slowing you down.

Misc

61. No key combo that will quit any application as Alt-F4 does in Windows.

63. With trackpad, cannot select by word. Correction you can but it only works in some programs. E.g. works in Safari but not Firefox.

64. Most programs that have a Mac version, it is incredibly crippled or behind in features. Picasa doesn’t have Geotagging, Mozy is missing most options, Chrome is unstable, etc…

65. Poor supply of good free apps, and Mac apps are always more expensive. Compare the paltry but expensive TextExpander ($30.00) with the much more powerful AutoHotKey (Free).

So there’s the list.

I guess I should say that I have come to love some parts of the Mac experience. Two finger scrolling is amazing. The overall hardware of the machine is top-notch. I would consider getting another MacBook only for the quality of the camera and microphone in Skype video calls. Now if they can just get about to some items on this list, I could really get some work done!

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(Thanks to Mario Negrello, Cliona Quigley, and Luke Howard for reading versions of this post.)

This summer in Berlin I took a vacation from making choices, and let my friends run my life.

Really.

For one week, anyone who was my friend on Facebook could edit my calendar, and I ran my life according to that calendar. Inspired by the popularity of “The Sims” game series, a friend of mine dubbed the project SimStan.  In this post I want to give a little bit of the reasoning behind SimStan, tell what it was like to live that way for a week, and share my feelings of why the project “didn’t work.” (And for any nerds reading, at the end I’ll talk about how it was built and give you the code if you want to build a SimYou.)

Starting almost two years ago, I became obsessed with the idea that people had too many choices. This came to a head in reading Barry Schwartz’s excellent book The Paradox of Choice. You have more choices than ever these days, and this excess of freedom paradoxically leads to unhappiness as you regret all the things you might have done. One trick to avoid this is to use an agent. If anyone or anything makes the choice for you, and you trust the agent, then you’re spared all the research into alternate choices. It’s why I only go clothes shopping with my friend Steph in New York; she’s my clothing agent. The original idea was to write a program that would similarly tell you what to do, but it would need some initial data of things it could suggest. I hit upon the idea of letting friends feed “possible events” into the system. And soon thereafter realized that the friends would be enough–it would be like Wikipedia, except friends editing your life! Or, in the parlance of Web 2.0, a “crowdsourced calendar.”

With this enthusiasm, I finally set about building the software last July. It took about three weeks of sitting in Berlin Cafés to put it all together. It involved creating a dynamic calendar interface similar to Google Calendar, meshed with Facebook’s login system. It looked and worked great. (More on technical construction in the postscript.) The site is still up and running today. You can play with it at http://simstan.com. Click the “Connect with Facebook” button to log in as a Facebook user. Last summer you had to be my friend to edit anything, but for now I’ve changed it so anyone can play around.

If you click on “Stan’s Calendar” and go back-back-back-back to July, you’ll see the schedule for my one-week trial at the end of the month. It looked like this.

I emailed about 40 friends who had expressed interest in the project, and pretty soon my designated week began to fill up. It was an interesting week! I visited a lot of museums, did some writing for a book project, did a scavenger-hunt through my neighborhood, wrote a letter to myself 10 years hence, and watched a Spanish space-themed wordless comedy show. You can read the exact details on the project blog, (First day, 2nd and 3rd days, and remaining day) but I won’t rehash it all here.

SimStan wasn’t “successful” in the sense that I’d hoped—more like an experiment where the scientists hypothesis is not confirmed! In a not-so-scientific off-the-cuff way, here were the problems I found.

• Turns out that running a life involves much more minutia than I expected, and this is compounded by people not planning for all the minutia that goes into even simple life planning. If I’m going to a show, I’ll need to buy tickets. If I’m going to buy tickets, I’ll need some time in front of a computer and internet in order to buy those tickets. And sometimes, like when you’re in a foreign country, you’ll need a few hours to straighten things out with your bank to buy those tickets. For a friend casually putting something on a calendar, they can’t be expected to think of all these contingencies.
• Having just moved to Berlin, a lot of my state-side friends didn’t know what sorts of things to have me do.
• I had hoped that SimStan would work out like Wikipedia, where many people making small edits end up making something amazing. But it turns out there is a critical difference: A Wikipedia article doesn’t have a deadline, and can slowly accrue usefulness over years. A plan for next Tuesday, on the other hand, has a very real deadline! And is basically useless after Tuesday.
• On a related note, friends were conservative in time-grabbing. I suppose no one wanted to seem “greedy” or overly domineering, so people tended to schedule using best-case-scenarios of how long some event might take.
• Friends would not edit each others work. I had hoped that when there was something “wrong” in the schedule, that friends would step in, Wikipedia-like, to fix thing. But this didn’t happen, for example, when I was scheduled to both get up early for walks and to go out to clubs until 4am. Then one time when an event was moved, it just left the original event creator confused.
• Turns out that I, and I think most people, need a lot of “down time” during a day. To be following a schedule hour-by-hour means to be continually “on.”  I found myself monitoring my time in the same way you monitor your fare in a moving taxi. It’s stressful.
• All of the above meant that I was often running out of time. I realized after a few days that I was actually keeping two calendars, the official one on the website, and an internal one where I planned out all the prep-work and recovery time that I would need.

So when the project ended on that Tuesday, I was actually quite relieved. At the same time, a little embarrassed, since I had been telling people about my hopes for the project for so long. How could I now say that I was happy it was over? So I just dropped it and moved on to other projects. It wasn’t until I visited my friends Steph and Ken in New York a few weeks ago, and an email exchange with Neil Robertson, that they encouraged me to do this write-up.

I’m glad that I did it. It’s all too easy to let a project idea grow inside of you, and you become ever more convinced of how amazing it would be if only you built it. In that sense, I am “free” of SimStan. Perhaps I’ll revisit the idea someday with some fresh ideas. In any case, I learned a ton: technically from building the software, pragmatically about  events and scheduling and how a person actually plans out a day, and existentially about all the little parts that go into “making a day” that we usually take for granted.

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Gory Technical Details

For all it’s faults, Drupal is still a fast way to prototype. SimStan is based on a standard Drupal 6 installation. The wonderful FBconnect module gave me an instant and easy connection to Facebook. The Event Module added basic date information to nodes, and iCal export that I could load in my iPod touch. However, it’s interface is awful. The fantastic JQuery Week Calendar by Rob Monie has the look-n-feel of Google Calendar. Most of my work was modifying his code into a custom Drupal module which would modify Event nodes, while displaying things like Facebook avatars. Of course lots of theme integration to give everything the same style, and little things like Cron jobs to email me my schedule each day and make backups of the database.

Download the entire project source code here: SimStan Project Download

A TED Talk from Cynthia Schneider about “Idol TV” reminded me of a paragraph from Niel Stephenson’s  In the beginning was the command line:

We [Modern Western Culture] seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

That was from 1999. Here is her talk, given this year. (If you don’t see it, you can watch it here.)

(And on a related note, China is coming to grips with race issues because of a mixed-race contestant on it’s own Idol Show.)

I love the fact that Hollywood, which is blamed so for so much of what’s wrong in the world, is actually changing the world for better* in more powerful ways than many “direct” approaches such as NGO’s or military action.

*In this case, “better” meaning more democracy, and the general spread of concepts like equality and human rights. Hollywood’s “payload” contains many other ideas, such as materialism and moral relativity, that aren’t so universally loved. Stephenson is ambivalent on this.

Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.

That’s the question: It is perhaps ‘good’ that the world is becoming more homogenized and that ideas like equality and democracy are being spread into every nook and cranny. But what is it we are losing in the process? And will this loss still be considered a loss for the generation that grows up in this new world?

The general thought in user interface design is to make the interface (webpage, software, physical device, whatever) be intuitive to the user. In other words, when the user performs an action in the interface, the product should do what the user expects the device to do. For example, if you press a right-facing arrow button on a music player, you expect this should start some music playing.

This is usually presented in absolute terms, where newer iterations of an interface get closer and closer to behaving as users expect. For example, the when the iPhone is rotated to horizontal position, the screen changes orientation as well. That’s fantastic.

But there’s something deeper at play. The users are learning too. Their expectations are getting more sophisticated and build on what they’ve already learned.

I thought of this the other day while contemplating some of the new interface features on my iPod Touch, and contrasting this with how the original iPod was lauded for it’s brutally simple and intuitive interface.

Has Apple discerned deeper truths about our expectations for interfaces, or have we the iPod users been enrolled in a multiyear training program? We’ve been learning about podcasts, about gestures, about tap-and-hold, about push interrupts, and much more.

If the iPod touch of today was shown to users of the original iPod in 2000, they would be incredibly confused.

In fact, users are always locked in an intricate interface-expectation dance with any device.

This works because their are enough users enrolled in this “training program”, and they are happy to help new initiates get up to speed on the interface basics.

Consider another example: even into the late 90’s, most computers manuals came with instructions on how to use a “mouse” and how to click on virtual “buttons” on the screen. You don’t see this anymore, because these skills are now so widely dispersed that any poor sole who doesn’t know them can learn from a colleage or friend.

Facebook with its constant user interface updates is wresting with this learning curve too. I’d wager that the Facebook of today, if launched 6 years ago, would never have become popular because of it’s extreme complexity. But again, there are millions of pupils who have been learning bit by bit along the way, and initiating their friends into the ways of Facebook.

Bottom line: If you are designing an interface for a new type of system, you must start incredibly simple. But if you grow the interface complexity slowly, you can build up a body of experienced users who will help newcomers. Grow too slow and you become stale, grow to slow and you leave your users behind.

RC4 is little bit of computer code that you probably use every day without knowing. It quite possibly made the web into a viable business platform by providing a means for secure monetary transactions online. The original code was created by RSA Systems and has never been released. But one guy figured out some code that works exactly the same, and in 1994, posted the code you see above to a mailing list. The rest is history.

Recently I’ve been fascinated at how important computer code has become to our lives, yet is so unknown by most people. So lately I’ve asked techie friends what they would nominate as the most “important” code. RC4 was the suggestion of Luke Howard.

(Sorry for the low quality and distortion. I couldn’t find a scanner so just used a digital camera and photoshop.)

Previously in lettering:

• Sleepwalking through time
• Somewhere in the Colombian Jungle

PageRank can be a powerful weapon. Like all weapons, the possessors don’t always appreciate its full power.

FlowingData posted today that a Boston designer stole several of their graphics, in a post titled Do not hire this guy.

██████████, a “user experience designer” in Boston, chose the wrong people to rip off. If █████’s work in data visualization looks familiar, it’s because none of them are his, and all of them were featured on this blog.

The evidence is pretty damming, and the guy almost certainly did it.

But the big questions here are (1) is that blog post a punishment fitting to the crime,  (2) how is the power to “punish” distributed on the internet.

First, is the punishment fitting to the crime?

On the one hand, content creators are generally powerless to do anything about theft like this. There is no internet cops looking for such theft, no Supreme Court of the internet to deliver a sentence. So it’s understandable that FlowingData would use whatever power they do have: they can write posts to their audience.

On the other hand, this power is awesomely strong. By creating this post FlowingData has insured that any search for the perp’s name will return their post as a top result. Because the blog is so popular, anything they write about is sure to be a top search result.

Possibly forever.

Commenter R. Kane makes a good point about long range consequences:

I think what I’m interested in is this: given the choice between two applicants of similar qualifications one would always choose the applicant without a damning top ten search result. Even in five years. Even if the application was for a short-order cook. (link)

and later

I’m raising the point that not only is his design career probably over, but any career. I think this is a profound shift, and I think it’s almost entirely due to the way search/blogs/comments work. (link)

I agree with Kane that this designer will probably have trouble finding any work in the future. And that is a punishment way out of proportion to the crime.

Second, how did FlowingData get this power to destroy someone’s career? In a word, PageRank.

My tax preparer has no internet presence, and it looks like they may have cost me almost a thousand dollars through negligence. I realized this morning that even with my mediocre PangRank, a short post about them would surely be the top Google result for the firm’s name. Believe you me, I thought long and hard about it!

It feels odd to hold such “power,” especially since it isn’t equally distributed. Not everyone has a blog. Not every blog has the Google juice to get a result into the top 10. But some blogs do, and this is a very unequal distribution of power.

It really is the wild west out there. What would ideal internet justice look like?

(Yes, I redacted the guy’s name so as not to contribute yet another page to search results. And yes yes, I realize that by linking to the original article, I am only further increasing the PageRank of that post, and further pushing that post to the top of the search results. PageRank is a devious power.)

Another page from my old journals, where I experiment with lettering. Emphasis here was on strict verticals, but to make all horizontals as fluid and swirly as possible. Done with the usual black ballpoint.

I think this is from 2008, after getting back from Colombia. I especially like the short entry at the bottom from when I’m sick—you can feel the sickness in the letters! Seems my best work always comes from extremes of emotion: either elated as in the previous example, or feeling down as is the case here.

Previously: Lettering: “Somewhere in the Colombian Jungle”

All Lettering Posts

I’m the go-to guy for computer questions in my family. And as I’ve visited friends in past months, I’ve done the same thing around the globe. The upshot is that I now have a pretty standard “package” that I give people. It’s a collection of free programs and a few tweaks that have worked best for me over the years. Having just done another set of installations this past week across western Germany, it’s about time to write it all out for me to remember. If you do tech support in your family, you might find it useful.

This is assuming they high speed internet connection and are running Windows XP or Vista. Say what you will, but that’s what most “normal” people use.

Browser: Firefox

The old classic is still the best. You can download it here. Google Chrome is decent alternative, but Firefox’s add-ons give you more options for patching things up.

• Remove all the default bookmarks and replace with one’s that make sense for the user. Change the name of each bookmark because the defaults are really long. My standard set, with the names that I give them:
  - Search: Google, of course.
  - Email: Gmail (see below) or whatever web email service (if any) they use.
  - Wikipedia: Wikipedia
  - Maps: Google Maps, with default location set to their home.
  - News: Google News, with local news set to their city.
  - Weather: Weather Underground, with location set to their city.
  - Dictionary: Wordnik, new online dictionary that I worked on last year. (Or dictionary.com if you’re feeling boring.)
  - TV: Hulu, which has most TV shows. Only works in United States, unfortunately. (Alternatively, you can also add bookmarks for specific shows that they like.)
  - Radio: Pandora is again sadly US-only. Ask your friend for a few songs or bands they like, and watch as they are amazed at the music that Pandora delivers. (You’ll have to create an account for your friend to save their stations.)
  - Facebook, if they use it.
  - Their bank, local library, and other sites that they might enjoy. My mom loves the OneAcross crossword helper, for example.
• Install Adblock Plus add-on to save them from advertsing overload.
• My parents had a problem with accidentally pressing “F11″ and making Firefox go fullscreen. (F11 is directly above the Backspace key on their keyboard.) Using the Keyconfig add-on you can disable (and add) keyboard functions to solve problems like this.

Anti-virus: Avira

All free anti-virus software is annoying, but I’ve found Avira to be the least intrusive. It does it’s job silently for the most part, save for occasionally showing a pop-up advertising it’s pay products. (This can be deactivated if needed.)

• Be sure to do a full system scan one you’ve installed it. If they haven’t had anti-virus software before, their system is sure to be infected.

Images: Picasa

You’d be surprised how many people I’ve met who have a digital camera but never figured out how to get the pictures onto their computer! I did a lot of research on this one, as my Dad has scanned 10,000+ photos and needs to manage them. (More here) The best free solution has been Picasa from Google. Of course, only install this if they don’t have any image program, or are unhappy with what they are currently using. I find many people are using crappy software that shipped with some product they bought. My Dad, for example, was using a absolutely hideous program from HP that had installed itself with his scanner.

• If they have been using a different program, or have downloaded images scattered around, move them all to their “My Pictures” folder.
• Have Picasa then scan only their “My Pictures” folder. Otherwise it will find all sorts of random crap from other programs.
• Remove the “Blog This” button unless they are a blogger. (Right-click on the button area to configure this.)
• If your friend uses Gmail, configure the “Email Image” button to work with their Gmail account. If they use a web email other than Gmail, configure Picasa to remove the “Email Image” button.
• If your friend uses Facebook, install the Facebook Uploader button and connect it with their Facebook account. Very important: Once you have installed the Facebook App, you must do a few extra steps: In Facebook, click on “Applications” in the bottom left, then “Edit Applications”. Change the “Show” option to “Authorized”. Find the “Picasa” application and click “Edit Settings”. Grant the application “Extra Permissions” so that your friend won’t be confused by having a 2nd step where they have to approve uploaded images within Facebook.)
• Connect their digital camera. When Windows asks what you want to do, select “Import with Picasa” and importantly also select “Do this action from now on.” The important thing is that Picasa launches automatically when your friend connects their camera.
• Show them how to print an image using the “Print” button at the bottom.

Webcam: Logitech

Video calling amazes people. Every person I visit who sees me viedo skyping with friends immediately asks “How can I get that?” And OK, they’re not free. But the good news is that webcams can be had for $20 these days—not bad. I’ve had the best luck with Logitech webcams, especially for sound quality. The one’s with Carl Zeis lenses have amazing picture quality. (Stay away from Microsoft models because the software tries to strongarm the user into Windows products, and the button on top is an unnecessary complication that will only confuse people as it tries to launch Microsoft junk.)

• After installing the Logitech driver software, modify the settings so that the “Logitech Assistant” does not launch every time the webcam is used. This extra floating window just confuses people.
• Mount the webcam so that your friend, when sitting at the computer, has their head right near the top of the screen in the webcam image. Not centered in the image.

Telephony & Chat: Skype

I’m not a fan of the new interface, but Skype remains the best video chat solution in my opinion. It gets through most strange firewall situations, and isn’t tied to a specific email provider like Google Talk or Yahoo Video. And at least in my family, it’s what most people already have.

• You’ll have to create an account for your friend. Be sure to give them the login details in case they need it someday.
• Add as friends any people that you know your friend might want to call.
• Add a picture to their profile, if you can find one. People like that.
• To reduce spam for your friend, change the settings to only accept chats or calls from people in their contact list.
• Configure Skype to login automatically and to launch with Windows.
• Configure Skype to use their webcam for video and for the microphone.
• Restart the computer and try making a call to make sure that all the default settings are correct.
• In Firefox and Internet Explorer, remove the stupid Skype add-on that is added by default. Sheesh.

Flare: Google Earth

While maybe not as strictly “useful” as other applications, Google Earth is downright impressive and people, especially older non-technical people, find it to be amazing. Furthermore, your friend can use it to Geotag images in Picasa if they later feel ambitious.

Office: OpenOffice

If they haven’t bought Microsoft Office, they certainly don’t need it. But of course, they are bound to need to read (and sometimes create) files in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint formats. OpenOffice does a not-great but passable job.

• Important: Change the default saving format to the Microsoft formats. (Yes, we all should support open formats. But believe me, you don’t want to try and explain this to not technical friends. Like it or not, Word and Excel are the defacto formats.) Go to “Preferences->Load/Save->General”. For each “Document Type” (Text Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation) change the “Always save as” option to “Microsoft XXXXX 97/2000/XP”.
• Java will be installed as part of this process. Be sure you do NOT get tricked into installing the Yahoo toolbar as part of this. (See Todd’s jihad against toolbars.)

Screensharing: Microsoft Sharedview

If you are especially close with the person you’re helping, and don’t live nearby, you may want to be able to fix things remotely. The most foolproof free solution I’ve found is Microsoft Sharedview.

• If your friend isn’t using Hotmail (let’s hope not!) you’ll have to create a Windows Live ID for them. You can use a non-Hotmail email account for this.
• Configure SharedView to use their account, and to log in automatically.
• Add a desktop icon that says something like “Share Computer with Stan”, but you might want to use your name instead.
• Of course, you’ll need an account and SharedView on your computer too! Test sharing their screen with you. Also, this will also put your email address as the default the next time they open the program.

I live several thousand miles away from the people I provide tech support for, so I also have people install VNC, open source screen-sharing application. I use UltraVNC which has good support for Vista and a good encryption solution. (Note that you’ll probably have to open a hole in their firewall and do some port forwarding, which is beyond the scope of this post.)

UPDATE: Just learned of LogMeIn Free, which looks promising. May be even easier than Sharedview, and also free.

Email: Gmail

Your friends probably already has an email service they use. But if they don’t like it or are looking to change, Gmail is the best bet. The built-in Google Chat also gives you a backup chat service for when Skype doesn’t work. You can have it pull from their old account if needed. Or you can have their Gmail account forward to their old account.

Backup: Mozy

This one isn’t free, but Mozy is something that you should encourage them is worth the $5/month. I honestly haven’t used others, but hear good things about Carbonite.

PDF Reading: Foxit Reader

The Adobe reader is bloated, slow, and constantly annoying users. Install Foxit Reader and make it the default for PDF files. Note that you’ll also have to make this change in Firefox. (In the Options dialog, click on “Applications” and find “PDF”.)

Final System Cleanup

If they’ve been using their system for a while and haven’t had a good tech support person, you’ll have lots of garbage to clean up.

• Remove all shortcuts from the desktop except for Firefox, Picasa, Skype, Google Earth, and programs that your friend specifically mentions using.
• Check the “Launch at Startup” folder to see what crap may be set to automatically launch. Remove anything that your friend doesn’t actually use.
• Clean out any toolbars from Internet Explorer and Firefox.
• Remove links to Internet Explorer from the desktop and start menu. Rename the Firefox shortcut to something like “Web Browser - Firefox”
• Remove unused programs from the “Start” menu.
• Remove unnecesary icons from the system tray.

Playing tech support for a friend or family member is a noble and often thankless task. Good on you for taking it on. If you have other suggestions or ideas (or a similar list for Mac or Linux?), please share them below.

More:

• How to Survive as the Family Tech Support Guy (or Gal) on Lifehacker.

Walking around Berlin with a friend, we hit upon discussing “What were the most important outcomes of Web 2.0?” In other words, now that Web 2.0 is officially dead, who were the real world-changers that came out of it? By comparison, the world-changers of “Web 1.0″ seem to have been Google (taught the world to search), Amazon & eBay (taught the world to buy online), eBay (taught the world to auction, and to sell its junk)

#1 Wikipedia - The hype around it has died town, but only because we all take it for granted now. It has become the standard go-to reference for the planet. We probably don’t understand yet how much this will change our society. At first I argued that Facebook had been the most important, but my friend argued convincingly that Wikipedia has changed the lives of more people and more fundamentally changed human life. It is interesting that Wikis in general have not had the same impact. (See my other thoughts on Wikipedia as the storehouse of objective knowledge.)

#2 Facebook - It rolled up all the other innovations in one neat and tidy package. Most importantly social networking (as from Friendster and then MySpace), photo sharing (as from Flickr), and “the feed” (not sure who originated this, though it certainly existed in other places before.) Traveling overseas, I am amazed at the how many foreign conversations I now here which are littered with distinct utterances of “facebook”. It was said that countries tied together by trade were less likely to go to war. I suspect this is even more true of countries tied together with social networks. (My thoughts on Facebook over the years.)

#3 Blogger / Wordpress / Blogs in General - It is now taken as given that anyone in the world can express themselves for free on the internet. Blogging was what brought this belief to the mainstream, and how we settled on the standards for this format. We take all of this for granted now, but we should remember that 10 years ago people were still debating of what order posts should go on a page, how comments should work, and experimenting with unholy hybrids like “blikis” (blog+wiki).

#4 Craigslist - Arguably the most important factor in the decline of newspapers in the US. Craigslist has revolutionized the way we sell and buy. The entire world of physical things is now far more liquid. It has mostly taken over from eBay as the place for personal commerce.

#5 Twitter - Though still without a business model, Twitter is certainly on to something. It came later in the Web 2.0 game than the others, and is an extension of the blogging paradigm. Perhaps it will be like Google, which came relatively late in the Web 1.0 game also.

Who else would you put on this list?

While my notebooks fill up with “things I should really blog about” entries, I was encouraged recently to share some of my favorite handwriting styles. That, and I was excited to find the My Handwriting Flickr group for inspiration. Most of you know that I’m a bit obsessed with letters, and in my mostly-daily journal I try to create new styles whenever I can.

This is a journal entry from 2008 after visiting the “Lost City” of Ciudad Perdida in Colombia. Inspiration was all (hundreds of them) stone circles that marked where homes once stood a thousand years ago–so goal was to exagerate all the circles in the text, and in all random-seeming sizes like in the city.

More about Ciudad Perdida at Wikipedia

On Flickr

…and greetings to all from Berlin!