Speechless.

The new Amazon Kindle: What they should have said

Dear Customers,

I believe in the transformative power of reading - the ability of an author to transport you to new worlds, introduce you to new people, and even alter your perspective. Reading is important. Reading is why we build Kindles. Reading is why millions of people use Kindles.

However, despite all of our jumping up and down about our ‘paper-like’ displays on our Kindle family of devices, we’ve decided to bring this message to you using a highly compressed 472x1629 pixel JPEG which makes all of the letterforms look like ass and yet still weighs in at a hefty 258,739 bytes.  You see, if we put lousy pixelated text on our homepage (and yes, these Kindles have been here for a good couple of years, despite the fact that you, dear page viewer, have never clicked on the damn thing), then when you look at your Kindle you’ll be overjoyed with the slightly less lousy pixelated text - that is, until you look at your iPhone rectal display or whatever it’s called, that we hope to god never shows up on that confounded iPad thing.

[…]

Yours, Jeff

It’s the little things that matter - iOS 4

This new icon folder feature is nifty, but there’s one thing that is making me nuts. If you look at the folder icon, the included apps are in a 3-wide matrix - but when you open the folder, they’re in a 4-wide matrix. I’m a very spatial person, and half of my wayfinding is by the position of the icon, not the icon itself, so this invariably leads to a lot of mis-tapping on my part.

Too bad if you’ve been in business for four years.

Maintaining aspect ratio

Here we are in 2010, a good bazillion years since the advent of the internet. Image editing has become a thing of the masses, what with everything from the iPad to Photoshop Elements making it easy to resize, recolor, and otherwise manipulate photos. So you’d think that something simple like resizing an image would be part and parcel of the repertoire of your average Joe, much less a web professional.

Unless, I guess, you work for the Gizmodo Department Of iPhone App Thumbnail Rendering And Posting.

I wonder if they’re trying to upsell me something

Note to webdevs: if you’re going to create a landing page for upselling, don’t name it “is_upcoming_trip_upsell”.  It kind of gives it away.

I love you too, American Airlines

I was updating my flight on the American Airlines site about an hour ago, but as life has it, I ended up with about 12 other browser tabs open as I was doing multiple things at once. When I finally got back to the AA site, they had logged me out due to inactivity.

How did they let me know about this little indiscretion?  ”Incorrect use of the browser’s Back button”.  Obviously, the developer would have preferred “Incorrect use of the browser’s Back button, dumbass!” but they wouldn’t let him migrate it to production. But seriously, there is no incorrect use of the browser Back button. That’s how the Internet works, and the site should support it if I were to click it.

(Truth be told, I do kind of love American Airlines, but that’s another story)

Communication with the user: some examples from the Lisa « System Folder

Are you saying yes, or are you saying no?

Interesting graphic here on syncmycal.com. They’re trying to highlight that they work with Outlook XP, 2003, and 2007. However, the graphic - a circle with a slash through it - uses the international symbol for “no” to say yes. Ouch.

Woot nails the ecommerce experience

Now that’s a great ecommerce summary page. I know what they’re shipping, where it’s going, and how to complete the task. Especially love the “stupidly large button” bit. Rock.

Windows 7 icons and the metaphor of the desktop

Many people (just to pick two: Frank and Francisco-Revilla) have long since discussed the death of the desktop as a reasonable metaphor for all sort of interacting with documents and capabilities of computing systems.

However, to a certain degree, computing has appropriated these metaphors for itself. Consider, for example, the concept of a ‘folder’. What do you think of first? A place to store (digital) files, or a piece of bent cardboard, perhaps yellow? For some (especially those who grew up with Windows or Mac), folders and desktops and files are inherently computer-based concepts.

So when you look at the Windows 7 icon for a ‘folder’, all gussied up and ready for the prom, it takes a minute to figure out what the heck it’s supposed to be. I mean, what’s with all the shine and the colorful dots? Not only do you have to reach back beyond the digital age to figure out what it is, you have to dig even further to the - what - 1950’s or 1960’s when they actually used metal to craft anything like a folder holder.

So what do we do - continue to look at the physical world for reference points, or start to treat concepts like “the folder” as the digital artifacts they’ve become?

Microsoft Update wants me to close, well, everything

I’m updating the XML converter for Microsoft Office on the Mac. However, it wants me to close Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection. I’m not seeing the connection there, but whatever. But now, I have to close the Auto Update program in order to, well, update.

What’s the iPhone’s ticket to success? 320x480

Despite recent events highlighting that much of the iPhone App Store is indeed just so much spam, there is still a massive, massive influx of apps written for the platform. Why the disparity between the number of apps for the iPhone and, say, Windows Mobile?

Theory: It’s all about 320x480.

A lot of designers and engineers work best under a fixed set of constraints: give them a well-defined problem, and they’ll crank out a solution in no time.

It’s the same with mobile application development. Remember the Palm Pilot, with it’s 160x160 display and fixed button layout? Hoo, boy, they wrote 32,363 apps for that puppy. But then along came the Palm Zire with its wonky key layout, and the Sony Clié PEG-NX70V (PS: Dude, I had one of these!) with its 320x480 pixel display (yes, same as the iPhone, and eight years prior), and suddenly the platform was no longer neatly constrained. And that marked the beginning of the end.

This theory also explains what’s going on with Windows Mobile. You’ve got several dozen hardware and display form factors, some touchable and some not, and a handful of OS versions as well. Nice and neatly constrained platform? Nuh-uh.

But then along comes the iPhone, with several bazillion sold (less, of course, than the several gobzillion Blackberry phones), and an App Store full of really, really novel stuff (and a bunch of crap). What’s driving the interest among developers, especially the low-budget indies?

I’m voting for the constraints: 320x480.

Guaranteed income for life!

As long as people keep building websites like this, there’s a loooong line of work left to be done in web usability.