Google's New Look

With the help of former Apple designer Andy Hertzfeld, Google is getting a much-needed makeover. Starting 6/28, the day Google+ launched, all of Google’s services began to change. It looks like everything will eventually have a consistent style, akin to Google+. Most-noticeable so far is the dark grey bar that now spans the top of some Google sites. This is a simple way to provide visual consistency across a variety of services. While Gmail has not changed yet, its new look can be previewed by changing the theme in settings. After changing it, I thought the ads in Gmail became much more conspicuous by contrast. This could be a problem moving forward, as Google relies heavily on those ads. While the new interfaces are far from perfect, they are a giant step in the right direction.

This is something that should have happened years ago. Better late than never.

The Nub

Nintendo announced their next home console on Tuesday, named Wii U. That’s not a typo. It’s not Wii 2 (that would make too much sense), it’s Wii U. What the U stands for is anyone’s guess. Ludwig Kietzmann’s first impression says it all:

It’s weird, you guys.

While similar things were said when the Wii was announced, it at least had a very intentional focus: motion control. The Wii was a traditional home console, like the GameCube, but with motion control. Easy to understand. But with the Wii U, many in the press seemed to be confused and bewildered.

Besides being more powerful, the Wii U is distinct because of its controller, which incorporates a mishmash of features jumbled together: a touchscreen, traditional controller buttons, microphone, speakers, camera, gyroscope, accelerometer, and even a stylus. This controller is a beast, but there is too much confusion. Wii-motes can be used with the console too, so does this thing replicate what a Wii-mote can do? Does it do motion control? How can it since it is a completely different form-factor? Apparently games can be streamed to the controller’s screen while the game is still being displayed on the TV, but why? How is this a viable controller solution if only one of them can be used with a console at any given time?

Despite all this, what troubles me most about the design of the system comes down to something very simple: the controller’s analog nubs. Make no mistake, these aren’t fully-fledged analog sticks, even though many are using that term to describe them. Every home console Nintendo (or anyone else) has released since the N64 has used analog sticks. Nintendo is the company that originally popularized the thumb-controlled analog stick. Analog nubs have (until now) only been used in portable consoles as a substitution for analog sticks. In fact, nub became popular term because of the PSP, which included an analog slider instead of an analog stick. While sticks tilt, giving more-precise control, nubs can only slide horizontally. It is much easier to gently nudge an analog stick in a given direction than gently slide a nub.

The tactility of analog sticks is clearly superior. Sony understands this, outfitting its latest portable console with analog sticks, not nubs. Meanwhile, Nintendo has demoted the controls of the Wii U, giving it two nubs that match the one found on the 3DS, its current portable. Why do this? The decision to give this new controller nubs is the crux of many baffling decisions made in the Wii U’s design.

And there is another word for crux: nub.

Faith, Love, & Work

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford, where he articulated his approach to the uncertainty of the future. He characterizes events as dots:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

While I would agree that the act of trusting is essential, it is unfortunate that for Steve, trusting in life (whatever that means) is just as good as trusting in anything else. Notably absent from the list, however, is God. It seems that if God exists, it would be ridiculous to trust anything else before him or instead of him. This should warrant a place in a list of possible things to trust in. But I digress. The main point here is that without trust there is no grounding. Because the future is so uncertain, despair is inevitable without faith.

Within this inconstancy, one thing to latch onto is what you love:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

Good work and loving that work go hand-in-hand. Couple this with faith, and a firm foundation for a lifetime of work is created. Steve ends the address with a short quotation that captures the seemingly preposterous confidence that faith brings along with the insatiable desire for something truly loved:

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

I Braveheart

Tonight is Steve Carell’s final episode of The Office (barring any future guest star appearances). Carell has created one of the most memorable and endearing characters in comedy television in Michael Scott. This clip is my favorite Michael Scott moment, taken from episode 18 of season 3. Those early seasons were the best.

What About The Content?

When it comes to technology, most of the conversation seems to terminate on itself. Tech blogs are about the tech, not about the content that the tech leverages. It is easy to forget that books were once considered high technology, but try and find a blog that is about the tech of books. The vast majority of blogs you find will be about literature, not books themselves. This is because the technology of books is boring. It’s old-hat. But other kinds of technology (e-readers, cameras, phones, computers, etc.) are still relatively new. Since the technology is so new, it changes at a fast pace. Since it changes at a fast pace, it is always fresh reading.

This is not a post condemning tech blogs or tech writing in general. That content thrives because it is interesting right now, and it will continue to be interesting for the foreseeable future. But at the same time, it is content that is self-terminating: we happily read news about upcoming Apple products on our current Apple devices. There is nothing that transcends. No art. It is important to be mindful of this, and make an effort to both create and consume meaningful content on our shiny new devices. Otherwise, it’s just an infinite regress that leads nowhere.

iPhone 5 Display

Joshua Topolsky on the iPhone 5’s display:

The display is actually edge-to-edge. Regardless, the sketch we’ve seen suggests the screen will go up to 3.7-inches while keeping the current resolution, and at that size, pixel density goes from 326 to 312 (a drop of 13ppi). That means that Apple can still tout Retina Display technology (the claim is that anything above 300ppi means the pixels aren’t distinguishable at 12 inches).

Every iPhone so far has had a 3.5-inch (diagonal) screen, and a jump to something slightly larger has been rumored for a while now. The increase in size will eliminate most or all of the left and right bezels. The goal seems to be: bigger screen, but not bigger phone. This will present a serious challenge to case manufacturers, because most cases (including Apple’s own bumper case) rely on those bezels.

Horse Armor

DLC (downloadable content) in videogames is still a relatively new concept. It wasn’t too long ago that boxed copies, offering no future new content, were the norm. What you bought on day 1 was what you still had on day 365. Now, software updates come regularly, offering bug fixes and new gameplay. Widespread internet connectivity is why this is possible: everyone’s PC, game console, or portable device has an internet connection. But for many the dark side of this new freedom is DLC.

DLC is supposed to be a good thing. Its promise is to add useful and meaningful content to a game that has already been released. This comes in the form of new items to use, new characters, or even entirely new levels. Players of iOS games routinely see these things added to games they have purchased. For example, Cut The Rope has nearly doubled its number of levels through DLC, and all of these came from free updates. This keeps the game fresh, bringing in new players, and it raises the value of a product for existing players. Sometimes this content isn’t free, however. Bethesda released an add-on for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion called Shivering Isles. At $30, it added 30+ hours of gameplay. While expensive, it’s difficult to argue that $1/hour is a bad value.

But Bethesda also released this now-infamous DLC item for the same game: horse armor.

In 2006, “microtransactions” in videogames were new but already very controversial. (The controversy is still swirling, in fact.) But then Bethesda released horse armor for Oblivion, and there was a huge backlash. It cost $2.50, added some armor to your horse in the game, and offered no additional benefits. Why all the dissension? It was an optional purchase, after all: if the item is not meaningful, don’t purchase it. But people did purchase it, and people still purchase it. Why?

Many are probably just oblivious, and don’t think twice about dropping a few dollars on something shiny, but useless. Others have a completionist mentality: they want to collect every item in the game. Call it OCD, but it a fairly common thing. By offering some items as DLC, the only way to collect every item is to pay extra for the privilege. This is demoralizing to some. To others, it is simply irritating. It adds a grocery store checkout counter element to games: tiny items of no real value, foisted upon the player. Little knick-knacks that bring nothing but clutter. And this just to cushion profits just a bit. It reeks of greed, but that’s what capitalism is built on, isn’t it? As long as people buy it, publishers will continue to insist on including these useless items.

But things aren’t getting better: this practice is becoming more pervasive. The just-released Portal 2 has microtransaction-style DLC as well: as seen in the beginning of this (hilarious) video. Even the most critically-acclaimed games aren’t exempt, it seems. The best we can do is give publishers no reason to include these items in the future by not buying them, but I’m afraid it is a losing battle. Five years later, it looks like horse armor is here to stay.

A TV For Your Mom

Rumors are circulating again about an Apple TV, and this time with more intensity than ever. No, not the Apple TV that is currently available. That is just a tiny box that plugs into your existing TV, much like the Mac Mini: a tiny Mac that plugs into your existing computer monitor. For every Mac Mini there is an iMac, and it seems eventually for every Apple TV there will be an Apple TV Set (for lack of a better name).

The basic, yet complex problem with an Apple TV Set is Apple. Steve Jobs has built a company founded on minimalism: no extraneous details, no unnecessary cruft. But TV’s come with a lot of baggage: DVR’s, DVD/Blu-ray players, videogame systems, etc. With all these things comes the now-ubiquitous rat’s nest of cables living underneath and behind every TV stand. Apple is not going to release a TV and expect all these things to be plugged into it, just like any other TV. What would be the point? Adam Lisagor sardonically agrees:

Think that beautiful piece of glass will have an RF tuner input? No. Kill your tuner. Your tuner is of no use to you. Think your Apple TV set will have even an HDMI input? You even want an HDMI input? God, you’re so lame, you don’t even deserve this thing. Oh, you want to play your little games? Maybe you’ve heard of something called the App Store, the single biggest distributor of games on the planet. Built into the set. Oh, you want to play your collector’s edition Blu-ray discs? Play them on your Vizio…You disgust me.

If Apple does release a TV, it will have a lot of things built-in from the start. One reason for this is to keep the clutter to a minimum, but an even bigger reason is the user experience. It just isn’t a good user experience for people to have a TV with several other things plugged into it, all with separate remotes. I bet your mom has trouble accessing content from her own TV setup for just this reason: it’s just too complicated. But what if that TV had all of these things built-in: a Blu-ray player (wishful thinking on my part), the App Store, and access to TV shows without the need for a cable box? That TV would essentially be a computer, only it is created to be used from the couch. It would have a single user interface (some variety of iOS) accessible from a single input device. That would be a much, much better user experience. One you wouldn’t have to explain to your mom.

Free Kindle

Looks like we’re still on track for that free Kindle from Amazon. The ad-supported model is only $25 cheaper. For now anyway.

Shelving Flash On Mac OS X

Flash is quickly becoming an old-world technology, and many progressive web developers are eschewing it in favor of more modern and efficient tools like HTML5. I don’t know if Flash will ever go away completely, but it is on the decline. For users, this is good. Flash hogs system resources, routinely causing the fans in my Mac to spin up. It makes web pages load more slowly, and is at the root of most browser crashes. It even decreases battery life.

As a result, I’ve been tinkering with ways to shelve Flash on my Mac. Originally inspired by Gruber’s post on the topic, I deleted the Flash plugin. Now, websites can’t load any Flash elements, and don’t see that I have Flash installed. This makes web browsing much faster, it increases battery life, and keeps my fans from spinning up. An additional benefit is that my Mac is not contributing to pro-Flash statistics. If a significant percentage of users visit a website without Flash installed, web designers will have to stop relying on it so much. This helps to solve the “chicken-and-egg problem” that occurs when a majority of people get stuck using poor technology.

The problem with this approach is there are still many times when Flash is the only option: a movie can’t load, for example. Fortunately, Google Chrome comes with a built-in Flash install that doesn’t rely on the system’s plugin. That’s right: even though my Mac doesn’t have Flash installed, loading a page in Chrome will also load any Flash elements. This allows me to use Safari as my main browser, with Flash shelved. When Flash is needed, it can then be pulled off the shelf by loading the page in Chrome.

To make this process more efficient and streamlined, I’ve been tinkering with ways to load the current Safari page in Chrome. The idea is to simply hit a key (F3, in my case) anytime I come across a page in Safari that I would like to load in Chrome. This was harder than I expected, but I eventually cobbled together this AppleScript:

property theURL : ""
tell application "Safari"
    set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1
end tell
tell application "Google Chrome"
    activate
    if (exists window 1) then
        tell window 1 to set URL of active tab to theURL
    else
        open location theURL
    end if
end tell

Instructions on how to use this AppleScript can be found in TJ Luoma’s post, which builds on Gruber’s idea. In my testing, this script above works better than the ones offered there. While it takes a bit of effort to get this system in place, it makes web browsing much more enjoyable. And this might seem silly, but I love having an excuse to keep Google Chrome around.

Instapaper

Lukas Mathis on Instapaper:

Look, if you don’t have Instapaper on the first page of your iPhone, we can’t even be friends. It’s a requirement.

Indeed. Instapaper is essential. Not having Instapaper while on the internet is like wearing pants with no pockets. Because of it, browsing the web can be just that: browsing. And when it’s time to read an article, it is easier to stay focused and read well.

iPad As Gaming Console

Matt Buchanan interviews Epic’s Tim Sweeney about iPad gaming:

In the iPad 2, there’s “far far more potential in that platform than we’re exploiting today”. And “iPad 3, 4, 5—we can do what we can on the Xbox 360 and beyond”.

Since Apple releases new hardware every year, the time frame for this is 2012-2014. While this sounds amazing, new console hardware will surely be released by Microsoft and Sony in this time span. That still puts the iPad one generation behind home consoles. But bear in mind that Sweeney is just talking about graphics. Xbox games and iPad games are totally different animals when it comes to gameplay. At least they should be, since the input methods aren’t the same.

That being said, World Of Goo is a shining example of a game that did okay on a home console, then went on to sell many more copies on the iPad. And it’s the same game that came out on the Wii. But it looks better because it runs at a higher resolution (the Wii is only capable of 480p), and it plays better because it is more tactile. Some games, like World Of Goo, are better on an iPad than on a home console. The sales figures seem to agree.

What developers need to be careful about is creating the right experience for a touch device. Porting an existing console game will almost never work. World Of Goo is the exception, not the rule.