iPhone user interface quirk #1 for audiobooks

Dan Sanderson provides a clear explanation, including pretty good photos, of one of the user interface “quirks” that can get you when using the iPhone for audiobooks, namely, the iPhone’s indicator and toggle buttons for Repeat and Shuffle modes are somewhat hidden, not 100% clear, and can be toggled accidentally if you’re not careful.

When listening to audiobooks, you of course want both Repeat and Shuffle turned off. On standard iPods, you do this in the main settings menu, and it’s effective for all tracks. But on the iPhone, as Dan explains and illustrates, the setting is harder to find, until you know where it is, and can be turned on and off while fiddling with your place in a track. See Dan’s full post for the details.

Thoughts on Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”)

I watched the Apple WWDC Keynote video stream last week, and have been following the reactions online about features demonstrated for the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5 (“Leopard”). A lot of people (especially non-Mac users) have commented that features like Spaces and even Time Machine have already been done on other operating systems, or as third-party utilities for OS X. They’re missing the point. What’s great about these new features in Leopard is their accessibility to normal people, i.e., their simple interfaces.

Continue reading “Thoughts on Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”)”

Trying Thunderbird

Today I set up Mozilla Thunderbird, the new e-mail client that’s coming out of the Mozilla project. I wanted to give it a whirl, because I’m looking for a new e-mail client for Rochelle. She’s been using Netscape 4.7 to manage her e-mail, and it’s becoming more and more inadequate.

Today I set up Mozilla Thunderbird, the new e-mail client that’s coming out of the Mozilla project. I wanted to give it a whirl, because I’m looking for a new e-mail client for Rochelle. She’s been using Netscape 4.7 to manage her e-mail, and that application is getting old, and has a number of issues, mostly having to do with the fact that it’s now completely unsupported software. Also, Thunderbird has best-in-class spam controls, which is very important, since Rochelle is beginning to receive more and more spam.

Problem is, I haven’t found a better e-mail client than Netscape. Outlook and Outlook Express are out of the question. They are deeply insecure applications, and the number one vector for spreading computer viruses. (Mark my words, in the next 12 months there will be a malignant virus that will wipe Outlook users’ hard disks clean. It’s just a matter of time.) They are also spam-friendly applications (though an Open Source project, SpamBayes, gives Outlook robust anti-spam tools). People who voluntarily use Outlook or Outlook Express are stupid. IM!HO.

I actually bought Eudora Pro for Windows for Rochelle’s computer, on the basis of my experience using Eudora on the Mac for the last decade. But Eudora for Windows uses the obsolete Windows MDI interface paradigm, where all of the windows are contained in one “parent” window. It’s maddening, and a relic from the late 80s. The application has a number of other quirks, differences from the Mac version, to the point where I found it unusable.

So I’m evaluating Thunderbird, to see if it’s ready for Rochelle. I plan to use it regularly over the next few weeks, configured to manage one of my less-used e-mail accounts.

It’s a good thing it’s a less-used e-mail account, because already in my first 15 minutes, it’s clear that Thunderbird is still pretty raw (giving double meaning to the “trying” in this post’s title). Basic e-mail functionality is there, and the application seems solid (no crashing). This is the result of Thunderbird’s gestation as part of the Mozilla Suite. You can use, and even rely on Thunderbird. But there are a lot of fit-and-finish issues, which seem like small things, but add up to making it unsuitable — unenjoyable — for daily use.

Some examples:

  1. The first thing I want to do when setting up an e-mail client is turn off automatic downloading of HTML images. (Loading images in a spam message can tell the spammer your e-mail address is valid, resulting in a lot more spam.) There is a control for this in Thunderbird’s preferences, hidden a little too deeply (Advanced -> Privacy -> Block loading of remote images), but easily checked once you find it. So far so good.

    The problem is when you get messages with graphics from valid senders. The graphics don’t display, as per the general preference, but there’s no way to override that for the one valid message. This renders some messages unreadable.

    Solution: a toolbar button in the message window to download that message’s graphics.

  2. The default font settings render many messages a blur, with the text far too small to be legible. (This is on Mac OS X, it might be better on Windows or Linux.) The “minimum size” preference seems to do nothing, and the View -> Text Zoom menu option does not appear to be a global setting. I finally solved the issue by changing my Serif font setting to Lucida Grande, a sans serif font that is highly readable, even at small sizes. But all in all, there are far too many settings and options that affect text size and font choice, and it’s not at all clear what does what, how they interact, or how to accomplish specific goals with regard to text rendering.

    It reminds me of Don Norman’s description of refrigerator / freezer settings in The Design of Everyday Things. In most home refrigerators the freezer and refrigerator compartments share a single compressor, the key component of the cooling system. Because it’s shared, making changes to the freezer setting, e.g., setting it lower, can affect the refrigerator setting, making it lower too. So you turn up the refrigerator knob to keep your lettuce from freezing, but that makes the freezer less cold, and your ice cream oozes out of the carton. You have to fiddle and fuss to finally get to a balance you can live with.

    It’s a ridiculous thing for an end-user to have to deal with, and it happens because the designers give you controls that affect the system’s internals directly, instead of letting you choose a goal state (e.g., a specific temperature for each compartment), and have the system figure out how to achieve it. Product designers and programmers do this because it’s easy to build, and because they don’t see anything wrong with it. The problem is that users don’t think like programmers, and have trouble figuring things out.

    Thunderbird is supposed to be a simplified, easy-to-figure-out e-mail client, vs. the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink e-mail client in the Mozilla Suite. They have a ways to go with the text settings.

  3. Thunderbird makes some assumptions about my e-mail reading workflow that are wrong. If I open a message, read it, and then delete it, Thunderbird automatically opens the next message, in a window sized and positioned exactly like the first message.

    First of all, while this straight-through workflow may work for some people, it’s deeply distracting to me. I pick and choose my e-mails, working via priority order (or whim), not on the order the messages arrived. I suspect most sophisticated e-mail users do this. Auto-opening a message I would prefer to defer looking at just means I have to close it, and then right-click to mark the message as Unread. Pain in the ass. There appears to be no way to affect this behavior.

    The second issue with this is that Thunderbird’s screen redraws are extremely efficient. There is zero flicker when one message disappears and the other appears. Because the new message appears in the same place and is the same size, only the text changes. If you’re looking at a new message that is visually similar to the previous one — say, two text messages — you might not notice it was new, and think that you didn’t hit delete at all. Guess what you’d do then.

These are three examples, but I’ve seen many other issues. I can hold my nose and manage this low-priority e-mail account, but it’s clear that Thunderbird has a few more months of development in front of it before I’ll give it to Rochelle.

Phoenix Rising Into Firebird

Mozilla Firebird, the latest milestone release of the browser-only version of Mozilla, shipped last weekend. I’ve been using it for almost a week now, on my Windows machine at work, and overall it’s fabulous, really a great piece of work. The prior release, Phoenix 0.5, was better in virtually every way than Internet Explorer, and the latest release, Firebird 0.6, is better in every way than Phoenix. Well, almost…

Mozilla Firebird, the latest milestone release of the browser-only version of Mozilla, shipped last weekend. I’d been using the last milestone for ages, and was really excited to finally be able to update to a more recent release.

I’ve been using it for almost a week now, on my Windows machine at work, and overall it’s fabulous, really a great piece of work. The prior release, Phoenix 0.5, was better in virtually every way than Internet Explorer, and the latest release, Firebird 0.6, is better in every way than Phoenix.

Well, almost.

The new default theme is wonderful, except in the places where it isn’t. A number of things seem unfinished, e.g., the default icon for bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar is a generic document icon, and it ought to look like some kind of link. Another example is the beveled edges that appear around these same bookmarks in the Toolbar, to indicate you’re in a hover state. They’re too close to the edges, top and bottom, and that makes them look off.

Many of the icons in the toolbars are too cute and different from each other. There’s just a gratuitous use of extra colors that keeps them from looking completely unified. For example, the Forward and Back arrows are green, and the Reload arrow is blue. The Stop “X” is red, which makes sense, but why are the arrows different colors? I don’t see a user interface benefit, and an aesthetic problem.

The Home icon is a lot less abstract than the other buttons, and it’s at a different isometric perspective from all the others. Why? No idea, but it detracts from the unity of the theme elements.

Last problem with the theme I’ll mention — the activity indicator is stupid. What does it mean? It looks like a Quake symbol off-kilter. It’s pretty, but meaningless, and more importantly, it’s more difficult to notice that it’s in motion, it’s thinner and so less visible. Why not use the standard Mozilla activity animation, which is truly wonderful, has a symbol that means something related to it’s function, and is easily visible when activity is in progress.

Maybe I should say that the new theme sucks, except for where it doesn’t. It doesn’t suck in the Preferences dialog, where it’s beautiful. Of course, I try to stay out of the Preferences dialog, on a day-to-day basis.

Now, I’m sure that these are far from the most important usability issues in Mozilla Firebird, but I do have to wonder if anyone is thinking about them…