All Things

Since I posted my Initial Thoughts About the iPhone, Dave Winer has described his experience after four weeks, and it’s not too favorable:

iPhone, month 1

He describes, for instance, how he couldn’t quickly retrieve a phone number from an email and return a call, and is generally unhappy with the iPhone’s email function, as well as its touch-screen keyboard.

Worse, in an interesting observation Winer notes:

“It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.”

It does seem that some people’s eyes and fingers fit the iPhone’s diminutive size better than others. I’ve long felt that the trend toward ever-smaller devices is a mistake. Early in the Treo’s development, when Palm (or probably it was still Handspring) was eagerly describing how wonderful it was that they were going to make it yet smaller, I got frustrated enough to write them about it, but to no avail.

If the iPhone starts to falter, it will be in no small part due to its form factor, and maybe then handheld device makers (besides Blackberry) will finally start to listen. Many devices, especially phone devices, are TOO small, and keyboards are important to a lot of folks, especially for texting and email, and must be gotten right. Some users seem to like the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard, but clearly it’s not for everyone.

Winer, who’s been involved with Mac software since the early days with the ThinkTank and More outliners, and seen both the good and bad sides of Apple, concedes that “the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device.”

He figures that “the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.” Indeed, a lot of folks seem to have forgotten that in 1984, initially Mac sales were good, but soon stalled after the early adopters (including myself, even though I’m not usually such) bought theirs. The original Mac was not really a very useful machine until the memory was bumped from 128K to 512K.

I’m sure that Apple is already working to fix many of the first-generation iPhone’s deficiencies, and will do it faster than Apple did in 1984-7 with the Mac. Nevertheless, the question remains whether they’ll be open to more radical changes - such as a bigger device with a bigger screen and real keyboard - which may be necessary to pull in a lot of the Blackberry’s users and other folks no longer in their twenties.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Jane Quigley has posted on her blog Setting Contexts a quite positive report of her first two weeks with an iPhone, declaring that her 8GB iPhone has exceeded all her expectations. In particular, she notes “iPod sound is … a definite step ahead”; “While the keyboard was a little challenging at first, I was a pro after just a couple of days”; and that “battery life … has been great”.

While there are apparently already well over 100 iphone apps available, she lists some of her early favorites, as well as some other resources. The ones Quigley recommends include Mockdock, PocketTweets, gOffice, Meebo, and Ta-Da. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s already a new GTD (Getting Things Done) app for the iPhone, iNozbe, as well.

The iPhone launched to a tremendous amount of anticipation, and even a funny video by long-time Mac & Palm author (and tech journalist) David Pogue. Despite the hype, it seemed that most all the initial user feedback was, indeed, similarly positive.

Now we’re starting to see some detracting reports. Some think usability issues will make the iPhone unsuitable for business. That raises one of my own questions - how good is the iPhone, actually, as a phone? It’s one thing to just try calling, but what happens when you’re busy - can you use it easily one-handed, or while driving, or is using the iPhone about as bad as texting while driving?

There’s also the question of whether the iPhone (without physical keys) will satisfy teens, young adults and anyone else who’s a texting addict. I’m certainly curious about the practical usefulness of the keyboard, probably what I most miss in my current Palm handheld. If Apple does succeed in making a good (not barely adequate) touch-screen keyboard, it will be a major step forward in interface design.

Now to my own impressions. I’m not in a hurry to jump to the iPhone, but have spent maybe 10-15 minutes on it a couple of times. It’s clear that I’m getting a little better on the keyboard, but am not yet convinced I’ll really get good at it. It was really surprising, though, that the horizontal keyboard isn’t available for all the applications.

That said, I’m sure there are a number of improvements Apple will continue to find to better the keyboard experience. This is where thinking about the little details, an area where Apple excels, can really pay off. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of such features are already there waiting to be discovered. GeekSugar has already noted one tip for speeding up punctuation.

The second time I used the iPhone, it slowly dawned on me that what I really miss isn’t so much the keyboard, but the mouse. Just editing URLs in Safari was quite annoying. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but the keyboard layout didn’t seem to help much for editing, either. On the other hand, the multi-touch screen works quite well for navigation, but you can’t really get the full benefit of it when browsing the web on the slow Edge network.

One thing that surprises me is how little discussion there’s been of basic Palm functionality on the iPhone. Does the iPhone come with apps that can replace the basic Palm Datebook, Address, To-Do and Memo functions, and import their .pdb files?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the iPhone will run OS X applications (and presumably Mac apps like Excel). Right now the answer is apparently no, but I don’t see why Apple couldn’t set up some kind of partitioning or something on the iPhone that would make that work, while still protecting the reliability of the phone and connectivity functions.

Perhaps the real hold-up in such a scheme for running OS X apps is memory, and with more flash memory will come OS X as well. Certainly, 4 or even 8GB seems to be an awful limited amount of memory for a multi-function device that’s also supposed to be a media player. With the way flash memory prices have been falling, waiting for a bump up to 16GB (at least) would probably be a good idea. Apple has a long history of introducing computers without enough memory, and I suspect the iPhone is the latest example!

Obviously, the Palm and Mac compatibility are important issues for current Palm and Mac users like myself, who are looking for a handheld device that really moves forward the “handheld computing” part of the equation as an important part of moving to one unified device. I expect the iPhone will satisfy these needs, as well, given time.

While the iPhone as a beautiful gadget and interface is itself rather compelling, perhaps the main question, really, is how long will it be before there is an equally-compelling must-have application that drives the second wave of its sales?

I wrote last fall about how Apple Needs Better Support for Mac Printer/Scanner Problems. Thankfully, it appears Apple may be aiming to invest more in printer functionality, as it has reportedly acquired the rights to CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

My previous post described how I’d continued to see occasional problems with printers on OS X, noting a particularly difficult problem I was having at that time with my HP 1320, that ended up taking up more than a day of my time and several weeks to get resolved. I still get fairly regular hits from Google searches for “hppostprocessing” error messages, so if that’s you, check out the comments to the previous post.

One of my main complaints involved the lack of diagnostics. While Mac OS X printing support through the Printer Setup Utility is fairly automatic, when there is a problem, there’s virtually no diagnostics to help you sort it out. I’d hope that improving such diagnostic support would be a priority for Apple.

Besides that, I’m still noticing various little quirks with printing on OS X (and am still running 10.4.8). Usually these aren’t showstoppers, but the system is doing something unexpected, which makes you wonder if there are lingering bugs. The bugs do occasionally bite, as they did the other day when everything kept printing with my 2 pages/page preset, regardless of what I entered in the print dialog (restarting resolved that).

As I wrote before, I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist”, who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. The Ars Technica article does suggest that “The purchase could also be a good thing for CUPS, since Apple’s support for the project could lead to further improvements (if Apple chooses to release them) and to more pressure being placed on printer manufacturers.”

In any event, it’d be a lot more efficient for Apple and the peripherals folks to get together and iron things out, before millions of users have to scratch their heads - and then bang them against the keyboard in frustration.