ordered CHAOS

mnmal:

Via Daring Fireball

Jeff LaMarche on the Nexus One:

To make matters worse, the sensors on the Nexus One for the four hardware buttons are not exactly aligned with the silkscreened icons. You have to tap noticeably above the button to get it to register. That was very frustrating for me until someone (from Google nonetheless) pointed out the mis-alignment. Up until then, I consistently had to hit the buttons three or four times to get it to register.

But even worse than that, the home button on the Nexus One is right below the fracking space bar on the portrait keyboard. Combine that with the not-completely-precise touch screen, and you have a UX disaster. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been typing and ended up leaving my application due to accidentally hitting the home button. Leaving an application mid-sentence is hardly a good user experience.

And Gruber wrote:

He’s got lots of other observations I agree with, but the above one is, without question, the biggest WTF on the Nexus One. It’s just bizarre.

Indeed bizarre. You would think that they would be meticulous about UIs and the touch screen, then again, this is Google; as much as I love Google, their products are always “beta”. I wonder why…

marco:

I was asked via email:

It’s my job to research user interfaces and what makes a successful UI. My two conclusions I’ve come to so far are that UIs need to be invisible and familiar.

I was hoping you may have something to add, from your perspective, about what makes an optimal UI.

The “invisible” bit gets most of the way there for my taste.

As a user, I hate buttons and toolbars and sliders and panels and drawers and splash screens and instructional screens and settings screens. In short, I hate UI. I want to notice it as little as possible.

As a developer, I hate having to stop my work because I have to arrange a transaction with someone else (like a designer) to get something done. To minimize external-person dependencies, and because my graphical design skills are abysmal, I avoid needing icons, backgrounds, textures, or logos. The original Instapaper web layout only had one image.¹ Since then, I’ve made extensive use of CSS for styling and Unicode characters for icons to minimize the need for images. Designing “invisible”, minimal UIs isn’t just a preference for me — it’s simply more practical.

But I look at Apple’s iPhone apps, and I don’t feel like my method is lazy or sub-par: all of their apps are the same way. They’re content-focused, with minimal UI. Think about it: what’s the UI to the Photos app? Messages? There’s almost nothing there. Even Safari is just two toolbars and a bookmarks list.

My design goal for Instapaper is for it to look and work like a hybrid of Safari and Mail. It’s not exciting and it won’t win much “design”² recognition, but it’s how I believe most non-widget iPhone apps should be designed: just barely enough UI to get the job done, with the vast majority of the screen devoted to the content.

What’s particularly interesting about the iPad is that its screen is actually too large for this to apply as universally as it does on the iPhone. This is one of the reasons why Instapaper’s iPad edition can’t just be a recompile of the iPhone version: everything’s out of proportion and it just looks strange. It’s like maximizing a browser window on a 30” monitor. And, as I said last week, I suspect most initial versions of iPad apps will have this issue because their developers either didn’t have the time to do more complete redesigns or because they underestimated how different their iPad versions should be.

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1. It was the “Read Later” bookmarklet. Jacob corrected its jagged edges for me, unsolicited via email, before I even knew him. In the new layout, these are pure CSS, but I’ve added a few small icons where it made sense to do so. ↩

2. On the internet, “design” usually means heavy use of rich graphics and textures. This isn’t how I think about it. ↩

I disagree with comparing 20K slaes of newbie NexusOne with 1.6 million sales of veteran iPhone. It’s just not fair.

But it is true that dictatorship works better (sad, but let’s face it) in many cases. Apple’s strict policies are pain in the … for developers but result in better apps (some might argue) and happier clients in general.

We’ll see how Google’s democracy will translate throughout the time, and I hope they don’t treat NexusOne like a Google Code project.

Yet another plist file in the iPhone OS 3.0 beta references four different unknown products. They could be new iPhones, new iPod touches, or even crazier things like a Mac tablet or an iPhone nano.

iStone vs. iPhone

The latest update I’ve got working is:

Data Network:

APN: etisalat.ae
user name: <leave empty>
password: <leave empty>

or

VPN (PPTP):

server: mnet
user name:mnet
password: mnet

VPN seems to be a bit faster though and slightly cheaper (not sure) and both charge an enormous amount of money! Almost AED 8.3 (USD 2.27) for loading only Yahoo! homepage and even after it appears to me that you keep losing money even by leaving it idle!!! So diable it right after you finished your job.

It’s about time, seriously!

I’m so lazy (or let say have never made an iPhone app before!) so I’ll wait for soemebody to step out and create some neat app for iPhone, just like the one Facebook has.

With all that image posting and text and video (well video is still a matter of time for iPhone) authoring tools, it would be a killer!

I’m even ready to pay for that. What do you say?

Just hold home button and click on power button, you got a screen shot in your camera roll, easy! Works for 2.x ONLY.

After struggling enough, I could finally do it. Everything seems to be alright.

Thanks to SlashPhone, or else I couldn’t do it. I remember Ziphone was more straightforward than PwnageTool when I upgraded my iPhone from 1.1.2 to 1.1.4 before.

Stupid enough that as I guessed AppStore doesn’t work for Dubai (UAE). It must be for the elite only! We’ll see.

In a minute it changed to 80 minutes, oh my!