Catch up
It seems like everyone wants new icons and new websites at the moment so I’m getting a bit backlogged with work. The iKana private beta will now be released tomorrow as that’s ready, it just needs the demo restrictions put in place and to be slapped lovingly placed into a disk image. iKana 1.0 is going to be a pretty rocking release I think, I’m really looking forward to getting it out there.
I’ve got a minor update to InstantGallery in the works which adds a Japanese localisation too (arigato Yukirou-san!).
‘A failure of imagination’
I noticed today that the MacZotAppADay organisers finally cottoned on that people are mirroring the freebie downloads they’re putting up each day this month – quelle surprise!
It has came to the attention of the MacAppADay team that some site visitors are currently ‘mirroring’ applications. The ramifications of mirroring are worse than you might at first assume:
- To protect the rights of our participating developers, we are unable to provide early alerts to bloggers. This is because the early alerts would include a download link, that a blogger could then ‘mirror’
- Time taken to send out Digital Millenium Copyright Act notices has meant our team have been unable to fix problems for our users on NTL, and other ISPs with shared IP addresses, as clerical work has been taking up all our time
- This also means we’ve been unable to respond to emails
- It has also dramatically reduced exposure for our advertising partners, who keep this site going
Man sending out 10 identical cease and desist e-mails is real hard work! (OK 10 is a guess but there can’t be that many). The real eye opener is the bottom one – remember someone is getting paid here and it sure isn’t the developers.
In my previous article about MacAppADay I wrote:
What you think because you gave away your app away for free for a day that people will suddenly pay for it tomorrow? No, tomorrow people will share it with their friends, stick it on Limewire and torrent sites and they’ll continue to enjoy its ‘freeness’. You gave it away free in the first place, it’s hardly a difficult moral decision to give a copy to someone else now is it?
They’re now threatening people with the good old DMCA. Seriously, did no one see this coming? But what’s more aggravating is that one of the site sponsors/someone involved in the running of the site, also runs the Mac-Headz.com forum which offers facilities for people to trade licenses/serials for apps they’ve bought on MacZot. That sounds an awful lot like I’ll show you my serial if you’ll show me yours. I can imagine more than a few developers might not be thrilled that people are swapping licenses for apps they’ve probably already sold at a loss.
On the death of the HIG and the triumph of eye candy over usability
What for years has differentiated Macs, and Apple devices in general from their UNIX and Windows brethren? The user interface, both physical and virtual. In recent years many including myself have noted the ever degrading quality of Apple’s user interfaces, increasingly eye candy has been the sole motivation behind many user interface decisions and usability and consistency have taken a back seat. Look at how many variations there are of the dark unified look, no two the same in fact. Apple even mixes and matches widget styles in its own user interfaces with totally different styles for widgets in one window than in another (GarageBand is a prime offender here) where there is no functional benefit of doing so. If you want to go all unified then just do it, don’t give me a grey scale checkbox in one pane and an aqua one in the next because it looks shit. Yes a user knows they’re both checkboxes but it doesn’t mean it’s not butt ugly. You don’t put one random blue key in the middle of a keyboard do you, why on earth would you do it in your UI? It’s a level of inconsistency that even Linux isn’t guilty of, and as someone who used to use Linux before the rise of KDE and Gnome I can tell you what a horrifically inconsistent UI looks and feels like.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, Apple produces a handful of applications, there are thousands of 3rd party developers out there, myself included, who look for UI design direction from Apple. We’ve reached the point now where most of us have twigged ‘the HIG is dead‘, in so far as UI consistency [obsolete link removed] is over, it’s every app for itself now. A good example is the incredibly hyped/popular Disco. It’s a fab application, I’ve already bought my copy and I’m impressed by its simplicity and functionality. But the user interface is awful…
What you cry, how can it be awful, it smokes and shines and shimmers?! Yet those things don’t excuse its most basic of usability failings – like an application from the 1980s designed for a Mac Plus it stubbornly won’t allow you to resize its application window, making browsing the list of files you’re trying to burn excruciating. You can’t even look inside a folder to check what files are present once you’ve dragged them into the application, you have to resort to going back to the Finder. You can’t give your disc a name longer than about 20 characters, not because of a limitation in the file system but because any bigger and the text wouldn’t fit in the fixed size window. It’s semi-transparent nature makes it look ugly as anything when it’s not sitting on a nice clean background (as you’ll find it in all the promotional screenshots). Its use of non-standard character spacing and inverted colour scheme makes it look alien on my Mac desktop. Is it trying to be a dashboard widget or a prototype for an Aero UI? It does away with the concept of selecting files with the mouse to perform an action on them, a concept as old as the Mac itself, its File menu contains one item ‘Close’. How is repeating a list of buttons over and over a more elegant solution? You could miss the scrollbar by about two pixels and accidentally remove a file from the list, something you could easily not notice you’ve done which could lead you to accidentally not backing up a critical file – an egregious sin for an application whose primary purpose is for backing up data.
It’s only a beta and I’m sure many of these issues will be fixed and I really don’t want to heap on these guys too much because it looks like a really promising app. But it’s inadvertently become the poster child for what happens when you abandon the HIG and go for the purely eye candy UI. If this is to be the future of application design on the Mac then we’ve truly lost the most precious thing about our platform, the quality of the user interface.
Update
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has given me a mention and done their own analysis. They get a bit hung up on the look of the UI rather than addressing the usability points I’ve raised, but it’s nice to give this issue some exposure lest other developers think that Mac users will accept such a functionally crippled GUI.
IG 1.6 beta out
Just a quick note to say that InstantGallery 1.6 has gone out to beta testers now and the public release will be out early next week (either Monday or Tuesday). There will probably be one more update to InstantGallery before the end of the year and I want to have NewsLife out well before Christmas.
On the Ball
Posted on January 5, 2007 by Rory Prior
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I came across
this[obsolete link removed] today via Daring Fireball. I’ve dealt withBrian Ball[obsolete link removed] before when I had InstantGallery on macZOT last year and I’ve had a number of IM conversations with him since, my lasting impression is that he’s not someone I’d want to work with again. These revelations by the xPad developer (and other things I’ve heard privately from other developers) don’t paint a very pretty picture. He puts forward the notion that indie developers can’t possibly survive by themselves and need his marketing genius to save themselves from going out of business.The following quote is from a comment attributed to him on Will Shipley’s blog that I think sums everything up:
Or it could just be highway robbery.