On Back-Buttons and Such
Regarding the argument that hardware back-buttons are a good thing in Jon’s piece i linked to earlier today: Those dedicated hardware buttons on Android and Windows Phone 7 devices are a curious thing. I completely agree with them in theory and on principle (usable and useful, widely understood concept, saves valuable screen real estate), but in practice i despise them. I don’t like using them because it feels disruptive to switch from touchscreen-interaction to hardware buttons. It’s not as much a problem with the home button, because when i press that button i’m normally done with whatever task i was doing, so it’s mostly okay to disrupt my interaction flow then. But with the back-button being such an integral part of moving inside an app on Android (and presumably Windows Phone 7 as well), i find it really disruptive. Furthermore it seems to me that the back-button invites lazy interface design and is often used inconsistently.
What i would like to see in iOS instead of a dedicated hardware back-button is a system-wide gesture for that action – similar to what Apple already does on the Mac with the three-finger-swipe. In addition, i would really love to have a distinct gesture for launching the iOS multitasking bar instead of (or in addition to) that silly double-click on home button. So, please Apple, could we get multitouch gesture support in your flagship touchscreen OS that’s at least on par with multitouch gesture support in your desktop OS? That would be swell.
On File Management in iOS
The iPad may not need a visible, all-dictating file system as we know it, but it damn well needs a filing system. This “post-PC device” depends on a PC, or on nasty workarounds like emailing or cloud services, to do what it’s supposedly replacing. (Unless literally all you do is read mail and browse. I’m pretty sure most of those people would like to write a document and file it away every once in a while too.) I get that this might be a lot to solve without repeating the failures of past systems, but it’s badly needed. If this isn’t addressed in iOS 5, one wonders what the priorities are in Cupertino.
[...] The iPhone is ultimately “still just a phone”. Most of the things it can do, like act as a bubble level or flute, is pure gravy; if your business didn’t buy it for you, you probably carry it to be reached and to mess around in Cut The Rope once in a while. The iPad is positioned directly as something that mostly replaces a laptop and is more powerful than the iPhone. The iPad is simply where the justified criticisms in the same iOS because of positioning really turn inconvenient.
“What do you mean I can’t organize my documents in a uniform way? I might not like exactly how computers work, but that’s what they do for me. It’s why I use them.”
Screw the debate about Flash, 7″ screens or device heft. The best thing Apple can do to take it beyond today’s PC is to bring it closer to today’s PC. They already have the innovative parts. The successor to flawed organization isn’tno organization. It’s time to salvage from PCs what still works so well.
As i wrote a while back: pretending this problem doesn’t exist won’t cut it. Revisiting how the Newton did it might be a good place to start.
iOS 4.2: Ten features it still needs. I pretty much agree with this list.
John Carmack on iOS Game Development
id just released Rage HD for iPhone and iPad this week and it’s great. It’s an on-rails shooter with outstanding graphics and easily worth the asking price of $2.
John Carmack has been talking to various weblogs since launch, saying rather interesting things like this in an interview with Kotaku:
“The mobile games that will define the future,” the co-founder of id Software said, “are going to be more connected and social and id Software is not likely going to be the company that does one of those titles. We will take targets of opportunity and the low-hanging fruit for it, but I don’t imagine we are going to be the revolutionary platform definer that really leverages mobile devices to their absolute maximum.
Also, this:
Rage is on on-rails shooter, restricting players from the freedom of movement they’ll get from the entirely-different console and PC Rage game coming out next September as well as from Doom, Quake and id’s other classics. An iPhone and iPad lack the buttons, sticks or cursor control customary for the standard first-person shooter style of games id makes, and it doesn’t sound like Carmack wants to pretend they do.
“It does feel kind of like an inferior version when you play that,” he said, referring to trying any FPS game on an iPhone or iPad. “It’s cool that it’s on there. It’s good enough to enjoy and have fun. But clearly you’re a step down from analog sticks, which is a step down down from mouse-keyboard interface. And it just makes me think that may not be the best style of game on these platforms.
You can find another interview with TUAW here.
App Consoles, Appliances & Apple
Great piece by Martin Watts (although the car analogy at the end invariably falls flat for me, as they always do; modern cars are not a great example of things you can tinker with these days):
Historically, most geeks—including me—have thought that people who use computers should learn enough to be their own tech support. We did, and it doesn’t seem that difficult to us, and it’s kind of infuriating that so many of the questions we’re badgered with sound fundamentally ignorant: people who don’t understand what the difference between memory and hard drives, can’t figure out how to launch an application if it doesn’t have a dock icon or a desktop shortcut, and can never find the document they saved last week because they don’t have the faintest clue what a directory is.
The model we’re moving toward, though, is premised on the idea that computersshouldn’t require routine tech support. Again, look back at game consoles: an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 is a fully programmable computer with networking capability, offline storage, removable media, the whole shebang, yet all of that is invisible to the user. What file system does a Playstation use and what directories does it put your downloaded games in? The correct answer is: “Who gives a shit?”
