Archive for July, 2008
Pure gold
Mr. Gates wanted Mr. Buffett’s input on whether to drop options in favor of restricted stock at Microsoft. [Gates] recalls asking: “How will employees respond to getting a lottery ticket that gives them a definite amount instead of one that could amount to nothing or a ridiculous sum?”
Mr. Buffett’s reply, according to Mr. Gates, was: “My wife would rather have a ticket for one fur coat, than a ticket that gave her two or nothing.”
I think I’m going to spend quite a bit of time reading this blog. I figure if you want to know what goes on in the mind of a guy who’s seen the big time, Marc Andreessen’s blog is as good as any.
How Pownce shoots itself in the foot
I want to like Pownce, I really do. It seems like, if used right, Pownce might be a good replacement for the problem-plagued Twitter (which I love dearly). However, there are still several deal-killers.
Any micro-blogging-like service that is invented after Twitter will have a big problem to overcome: many people already have their social networks defined there. For Pownce to be as popular at Twitter, it’s going to have to try much harder to automate the process of moving your friends over. Although Pownce has a feature that lets you import your friends from Twitter, it shoots itself in the foot by making the process brain-dead tedious. Upon contacting Twitter, Pownce presents an interface that looks like this:
You’d think that you’d be able to just click “Add Friend” one after the other to quickly invite people, right?
You’d think.
Instead, your friend’s entry in the list is replaced by this:
After a few seconds of waiting, Pownce dumps you onto your invitee’s Pownce profile page. To invite the next person, you have to click your Back button and click on the next friend to invite. What we have here is a wonderful example of AJAX gone bad. The UI could easily have allowed you to just click a checkbox next to each name and press Invite just once. What’s exacerbating is that while you’re waiting for Pownce to “proces your request”, it allows you to continue clicking on “Add Friend” buttons. However, the moment it finishes processing your first request, it dumps you onto that person’s profile cancelling your subsequent requests.
Here’s another one. Pownce tells me: “hey, you have a friend request, you popular guy you”:
Excited, I click on it, and here’s what I get:
Pownce LOL’ing in the background: “made you click on it, LOSER!”
Thanks, Pownce.
Killing me softly with his words
Humans suffer from bright’n’shiny complex, where we’re titillated by the new. Think of it like this: have you actually done anything with that last domain you bought? No. You had the idea for it on Tuesday morning and you got all fired up, so you bought the domain the moment you got in to work. At lunch you furiously doodled your design in your notebook, fully intending to get home and get started on the HTML/CSS, and then you got home… and watched Lost.
Get… out… of… my… mind!
Suggestion for an iPhone special-case copy & paste function
iPhone 1.0 really didn’t need a clipboard for two reasons:
- there weren’t that many content generation apps that could take advantage of a clipboard, and
- those that did had custom functions that allowed you to move data around, for the most part (e.g., attaching a photo to an email from within the Photo Album).
With the advent of the App Store, all of a sudden there are a myriad of apps, many of which would benefit from the ability to have data shuttled to and from them. Take the WordPress application, which I’m using right now to type this post. I’d like to provide hyperlinks to resources that are related to this post, but short of hand-typing them in, there’s no way for me to embed a link. Let’s say that after I finish this post I want to share it with the Twittersphere. Again, short of manually typing the post URL into Twinkle (my iPhone Twitter client of choice), there’s no way to perform this action. On more conventional computers, copy & paste would easily do the job. But copy & paste on the iPhone warrants deeper analysis, as the iPhone is hardly conventional.
Copy & paste is a multi-step process: select something, hit copy, move your cursor, and hit paste. The problem that Apple is faced with is in that very first step. Usually to select something, you would drag your mouse cursor over some text. On the iPhone, this gesture has been assigned to a different function: dragging scrolls instead of selects. Apple seems to be stuck on what to do about this dilemma. However, not all copy & paste tasks require fine-grained selection. I’d be willing to bet that most of the time, a “special-case” selection would suffice.
People move URLs around a lot, so how about a button that copies all URLs that are visible on a screen to a clipboard? The user could then switch programs, touch a field, hit a paste button, and select a URL to paste. Alternatively, there might be a button that copies all text out of an active field, and another button to paste the text into a different field. Since many fields are less than a sentence long (e.g., email addresses and note titles), even if you wanted only a portion of what was copied, it would be easy to delete what you didn’t want after pasting. These two mechanisms would easily take care of the problems I mentioned above.
The best part about implementing special-case copy & paste is that it doesn’t reserve any interaction gestures for its use. All it takes is an application developer to place a button on screens that are likely to benefit from clipboard functionality. Apple can then take its time to design a more general way to provide copy & paste, and not have to worry that it will conflict with special-case copy & paste.
Every new application that’s released will potentially exacerbate workflow issues caused by the lack of an iPhone clipboard function. A special-case copy & paste is a pragmatic near-term solution that can enable inter-application workflows and provide time for Apple to do the the proper human experience testing on a more general solution.
Electric Outlet 2.0
Ironic Sans proposes a design for a new type of electric outlet that delivers DC power directly. Such a plug would get rid of all those power bricks that devices require to convert AC to DC. What a great idea. I wonder what it would take for it to gain traction.