The Tap Web

I've grown accustomed to the iPhone's Safari Touch browser, such that I find myself irritated when I can't use the double-tap-to-zoom-in technique on my desktop browsers.

Web pages are rarely organized with reading content as the sole priority. Content is a hook to expose you to links to even more articles, all of which contain ads. Indeed, on many web sites, consideration for the reader seems to be at the bottom of a very long priority list.

It's not hard to understand why. Readers expect a bottomless supply of written content at no cost. Someone needs to foot the bill, and advertisers are willing. Maximizing advertising means maximizing reader exposure to in-site material, and most readers are not going to look for more content unless their interest is actively tickled.

The end result is a web full of sidebars and banners only a circus promoter could love. I'm not even talking about the ads themselves, obnoxious though they can be. I'm talking about the intra-site promotions with busy layouts and in your face color schemes, crammed together in such a way as to make one think the world's white space supply ran out. Not that the ads are delightful, either.

Double Tap turns the situation significantly in favor of the user. Tap-Tap, and the website effluvia vanishes. All I see is The Article. No sidebars, no promos, no feature pimping, no widgets. Just the Thing I Came For. And once I've zoomed on my target, it's not like I'm going to zoom back out to See More Stuff. When I'm done, I'm done.

The experience is so different, it's like a different web altogether, the Double Tap Web. The thing is, all the concerns that led to the current situation on the Normal Web can be appeased on the Tap Web without the pain points.

The goal of information-based websites is simple: Be of interest to the reader, expose the reader to advertising, interest the reader in more content. Repeat.

The Tap Web can support ads. Anything can support ads. The Tap Web also supports self-promotion. At the end of the article, show me a list of related content that might be of interest. This technique is especially effective, because by reading a particular article, the reader has self-identified their interests, making it easier to target both ads and further content.

A site that has been particularly successful for me this way is Zen Habbits. I queued up a dozen articles just by jumping from one recommended link to the next. Call it the YouTube effect. Post-roll is a great place to put links. It's right when and where I'm open to something else to read.

If you aren't convinced, swap "The Tap Web" for "The RSS Web". If anything, Double Tap on the iPhone lets readers arbitrarily insert the user experience of an RSS aggregator into any web page. The difference being RSS is still catching on among non-techies, whereas the potential market for The Tap Web is iPod users. In other words, everybody.

If Apple plans on pushing the iPod Market in an iPod Touch/iPhone direction, and there can be no doubt this is the plan, millions of web readers will be viewing our web pages through a Tap-shaped lens. Which means millions of readers will be able to switch off our obnoxious promotion schemes.

And note that the ability to do so is nothing new. We the power users have been able to shape our web experience for a long time. The difference is that not only will general users have this ability, but in the context of a touch device, such ability will be necessary to even use the web. In short, users will be blocking our web administrative artifacts as a matter of survival.

I can't help wondering how great the regular web would be if it more closely resembled the Tap Web. In the least, I'd like to see an acceptance in major websites that while intra-site promotion is necessary for business, there's no reason this experience has to be so hostile to the reader. Too many links dilutes the value of each link.

Indeed, it may be that a more focused strategy to site promotion will lead to more internal reading, not less, and thus stronger attraction for advertisers. Especially if said readers are strongly targeted. More customers works as a strategy, but so do better customers.

Boon or boondoggle, the Tap Web is coming. Now would be a good time to think about how tap-friendly our sites are.

On Switching Reddits

My thoughts on switching from the general reddit feed to the programming subreddit? One should only immerse oneself in other programmer's opinions of programming. On any other topic, we are quite, quite insufferable. Politics, religion, government conspiracies. Insufferable.

Do yourself a favor, and make the switch. Your brain will thank you. I'm sure you're all terribly surprised by this conclusion.

Waterloo

So Joel Spolsky wrote this article about the IE8 situation. Mark Pilgrim fired back with this riposte. It's been a firestorm ever since.

Mr. Spolsky makes a formulation: On one side, you have the "make IE8 work with the (IE7) web as it is" people, and on the other, standards supporters. Always beware dichotomies.

Furthermore, these "standards people" are "idealists" while the other guys are "pragmatists". I support standards, so in this formula, I'm an idealist.

Thing is, I'm just trying to make web sites. I just want them to work. I want to do my job. My code works better when browsers work the same way. I write less code.

I spend a lot of time scratching my head, trying to figure out why Internet Explorer won't do something. From my perspective, I'm the pragmatic one. Microsoft wants to bend the web into a particular pretzel. Who's the idealist? Are we to forever be practical about Microsoft's past ideals?

But what really gets my gall is the argument that Microsoft didn't implement the standards because they are "too hard". I read Joel On Software regularly, and have bought both his books. Suffice to say, I was deeply disappointed by this line of argument.

If you think browser standards are too hard to implement, get out of the browser business. Or, seeing as Microsoft sits on the committees that writes these standards, maybe they could make the standards easier to understand? Or even read them.

The funny thing is, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera are implementing these standards just fine, thanks. And for what it's worth, IE8 adheres to standards better than ever. It almost makes one think it can be done, and is not, in fact, this impossible task as Mr. Spolsky presents it. You might wonder if Microsoft couldn't have done this a long time ago.

In fact, as someone who works around this crap as part of his job, I feel I have a pretty clear idea on deviations from a standard, and where the standard actually lies. Microsoft has some of the smartest people in the world. They can't figure this out, but I can? In ten years, the entire web is awash in developers explaining exactly what the problem is, and Microsoft's answer is, "It's too hard to understand the standard we wrote."

Sorry, I'm not buying it. Five years of no improvement means I'm calling shenanigans.

Microsoft, like Napoleon, conquered the web, then got lost basking in its own glory. Now the rest of the web has banded together, and we're conquering it right back. Waterloo is on the horizon.

Want a browser whose new version doesn't break the web because it has always supported, and is in fact made of the web? Get Firefox.

A Simple Question for Apple

If there's one feature on my iPhone that strangers new to the device gasp at, it's the photo viewer. In particular, it's the moment when I switch between images by flicking them left and right.

Indeed, for all the attention given the pinch, I think it's really the swipe that is the supreme, defining gesture of the iPhone. The pinch is slightly abstract. It's not something you can do in real life. Useful? Hells yes. But you can't stretch a photo in real life.

You can flick things around, though. Flicking through a list is borderline visceral. It could pass for a physical interaction. It feels real, and after years of abstract computer interactions, the effect can be startling. In one second, you come to realize just how horrible and wrong-headed our use of scroll bars has been. Proportional scroll bars are great as indicators, but not so great as interaction devices. My MacBook has two-fingered scrolling. I haven't used a scroll bar in years.

So here's the question: Why the heck doesn't this wonderful swiping foo work in the iPod application? I'm talking about in portrait view. In landscape, you have coverflow, and you can swipe to your little heart's content. But in portrait view, you just have The Buttons, and they are Not As Good. The beautiful parts of the iPhone are the parts that take something mechanical and make it feel natural and organic. Yet this wonderful standard is absent in the iPod app. I'd love to know why. And then I'd like it fixed.

Buying Cheap Stuff Doesn't Save You Money

The Key to Wealth is Being Satisfied with What You Already Have

I've been reading the Get Rich Slowly blog, as the topic is of some interest. The piece linked above makes a point I appreciated last week.

To get rich, you need positive cash flow, which generally means not spending money you don't have. So if you cultivate satisfaction with what you have, you won't waste money buying more stuff.

Last week, I dodged a minor itch for Yet Another iPod. I have four iPods currently. I don't need another. But it's fun to open new Apple stuff, and it's really amazing how small those new Nanos are... So on a trip home, I dug up my other iPods, grabbed my Shuffle, and have been happily playing with it since.

I found myself wishing it had a bigger screen, maybe touch interactivity. Web. Email. Phone. Oh yeah. Already have one of those. And thus did I find myself still satisfied with my still excellent iPhone. This maneuver was executed using property I already own.

One thing not mentioned in the piece is the equally important corollary: Don't buy things you won't be happy to own for years to come.

Which sounds all well and good, but I often end up not doing this. The reason I don't do it is that I think I can save some money, and get something "good enough".

This is always a mistake. There's usually a reason I prefer something, but there doesn't need to be. These are my emotions, this is my heart, and as we know, it wants what it wants. If it wants a good sofa, a cheap replacement sofa simply won't do. I could compromise, and get something pretty good, but I won't like it. And when the day finally comes when I admit to myself that I don't like my compromise, I will have trouble mustering the will to replace it. I already have a decent couch, why get a new one?

Thus will this object I don't like remain in my home for some considerable time. It seems perverse to spend vast swaths of my life owning things I don't like.

If I do eventually buy the better couch, now I've spent the price of the couch I really wanted plus the price of the couch I didn't really want, instead of just the price of the couch I wanted.

I felt this most heavily working my way through headphones. I shudder to consider how many headphones I purchased that I didn't really like. I have since changed my tune, and own four pairs today, each purchased because I selected it as the best choice for me. (The most spectacular was a gift. Thank you, baby.) I'm happy with all four, and have not bought new pairs since.

Barry Schwartz calls this process of buying things you want and being happy with your choice "Satisficing." He wrote a good book on the topic. You should read it.

So, buy things you like and stay happy with them. Save money. Get rich. Feel happy. It works.