Mac Users in a Nutshell

When the new version of iTunes came out, Mac users seemed more or less pleased with the new version. We are Mac people, so a refined user interface always strikes us as a perfectly good reason to upgrade a program. Most of us seem to approve the modifications, save for one area that irks. You see, they changed the radius of the corners of the windows. In normal mac applications, the corners are rounded to go with the circular widgets in the upper left corner of the window. So the window has a nice graceful arc at the edges. But with the new iTunes, the curvature of the corners is very sharp, more like a square that's been chipped.

Every mac site I've read has commented disparagingly upon the new corner radius. It irks us. It looks like a hack job. Normal people don't notice these things, I suspect. But we are mac users, and as Garrison Keillor always says, Sumus Quod Sumus. We are who we are.

Disappearing Gizmo

The nano has arrived, a beautiful black 4 gigger. Thoughts:

1. It's small. Really really small. It fits my little jean pocket exactly, so well, in fact, that I suspect it was a direct design goal. I remember when they made the lamp iMac, Ives said his inspiration was a flower. I'm about certain that Steve Jobs pulled in his jeans, and told them to make it fit in his little pocket. Really. It's the exact size.
2. It weighs nothing, but feels absolutely sturdy. I've owned two regular iPods, a mini, a shuffle, and now the nano. (I know, Eric. I know.) The regular iPods can feel ever so squishy, while the minis were absolutely solid. But the nano takes the cake. It feels hewn from a block of pure plastic and metal. Impressive.
3. Color screens are nice. I viewed it as a side luxury, but it really makes the device easier to read. Also, the display is so bright, I could almost use it as a flashlight outside. The color is beautiful and subtle. At long last, iPod solitaire should be doable.
4. I like having photos on my pod more than I thought I would. I guess normal people would place prints in their wallets. But my photo collection is all digital, and has been for some time. It isn't glorious, but it's nice having pictures of my beloved and my family at hand.
5. The sound is as good as any iPod.
6. Details. Unlike other iPods, the click wheel's select button is level with the rest of the unit. It may seem insignificant, but it makes it even less likely the button will be inadvertently clicked. I've had that happen a few times, and it's annoying. Apple used to have another company make the vaunted clickwheel, but now the design is in house, and it has the mark of Jonathan Ives all over. Details like these are what makes owning Apple products (usually) such a pleasure.
7. The iPod mini click wheel could be a little flakey, and a insensitive. It could be tricky to do fine grained scrolling easily. Not so with the Nano. Best scrolling iPod I've seen. Again, Ives, Ives, Ives.
8. God, the black is just gorgeous. Gorgeous. I promise, you're going to see more black in the iPod line.
9. I thought I might dislike the weird headphone jack on the bottom configuration. But the pod is usually in my pocket, so I don't really care what way it sits.

Now, a word about the device as strategy. My first thought when m'lady told me about the nano was "Why?" The iPod is chugging. As has been noted, the Mini was the best selling player in the world, and Apple decided nope, not enough. We're going to make it better. We're going to use flash. We're going to give it a color screen. We're going to make our own damn click wheel. Why? The simple answer: Steve Jobs is the obsessive sort.

But here's something else: Apple the killer. Apple has had various reputations in its history, often as being idealistic, arrogant, artsy, inept, inspired, and that old chestnut, beleaguered. I don't recall a situation where Apple was regarded as a relentless machine. Granted, the opportunities have not been plentiful. But the opportunity has appeared, Apple's competitors were on the ropes, and Apple has decided to go for the kill. For a long time Apple fan, it's very interesting.

I also find it interesting, though not surprising, that Apple has gone all-color so quickly. You can't get an iPod with a gray-scale display anymore.

Planting seeds for a future media strategy? One involving color moving pictures? We'll have years, or at least months, to speculate away.

The advice I wish I'd been given

I remember sitting at my graduation, marveling at the surreality of being in a room full of two hundred people I'd seen almost every day for thirteen years, and 99% of whom I will never see again.

What I don't remember was the speaker. I know we had one. But his word was the usual blather. Most commencement speakers are obsessed with discussing the meaning of commencement. I've never found that helpful. Any event means different things to different people at different times. And determining "meaning" is a personal task.

If I were ever in a position to give a commencement address, I would instead focus on another area of life: How to make money. To make money, you must be successful. And the key to success, near as I can tell, is to do interesting things.

Think about how much time you spend looking for interesting things to see and do. Reading reviews. Surfing the internet, asking friends. We like to encounter interesting movies, books, music, stories, jokes, devices, cars, and so on.

So how does one make and do interesting things? Companies spend millions of dollars attempting to answer this question, and most of the time, the folks who find the answers seem to come out of nowhere. Worrying about or second guessing what someone else is going to want has rarely struck me as an effective means to create a successful product. The problem is well known to creators the world over: Customers don't know what they want until they have it. You can listen to focus groups all day, and meet their every need, and end up with absolute dreck. Ask Microsoft.

No, the people that make the interesting breakthroughs usually do so because they have a different process, and it should be your process, too. The process is simple: Interest yourself.

Yeah, it can be a drag to a creative type to admit that no, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, at least in the land of finding interesting things. Chances are, if you like something, someone else will, too. So if you create something for yourself, that you like, chances are good a whole host of others will share your enthusiasm. And like you, when you offer something interesting, they will trade you money for your interesting stuff.

Even better, doing things that interest you feels good. It will make you happy. I really hope being happy is your goal in life.

I'll give a small example. I was programming some CRM software at work. I noticed the software was using a lot of tables of information, about people, groups, and events the people were attending. But the way the tables were generated was not efficient. Each was built by hand. So if I wanted to change every table on the system the same way, I would have to change perhaps dozens of lines of code, which was always time consuming. What was needed was a tool to handle the parts that were the same. But no such tool existed, so I decided to write it. Eventually, the tool reached a level of stability and quality that I mentioned it to my boss. He was impressed, and decided that a number of other tools would be useful. We improved and tested them through a number of small project. Currently, we are using souped up versions of those same tools to create a very large program for a very large client. We recently demoed the big project to the big client. The client asked for many feature enhancements, and all of the suggestions sounded easy. Why? Because we had a toolset that could easily handle change.

Many hands have touched those tools, and made them much better and much more solid than I ever could have. And many of the tools we now have, I never dreamed of making. But I will take credit for this: Before I started my little project, there were few tools of any kind in our codebase, and now we have an industrial strength set. I tell you this not to brag. (Well, maybe a little.) Rather, I'd like you to observe a few things.

1. No one told me to start writing tools. I was simply interested in better code.
2. There was no focus group. Only my own interest was valuable to me.
3. When other programmers at the company saw the tools, they found them interesting as well, and began using them.
4. We are currently making money from the agile system our tools enable. A _lot_ of money.
5. Because of my efforts, I received a sizable raise, and much more control of how I use my time at work. And I'm happy at my job.
6. I'll repeat that. I'm happy at my job.

I can't promise the same to anyone else. Your mileage may vary. But I've read quite a bit from people who succeed, and there are definite trends. They do what interests them, not what a committee of well meaning overseers suggest.

They interest themselves. That's my advice to you, imaginary graduating class. Be interesting to yourself. I eagerly await the results.

Just call him Dick

Salon sayeth:

And Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., suggested that the residents of New Orleans who failed to escape the flood should be punished. "I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving."

I'm too poor to evacuate, and as a result, you'll send me to jail?

Holy shit, that's cold.

From now one, we shall refer to Mr. Santorum as Dick. Dick Santorum.

Next year, we can vote this douche out. Let's please do so.

Small and Shiny

People like small things. This concept seems foreign to legions of slashdotters and internet blowhards. It seems every time Apple releases a new iPod into the world, a large swath of pundit-land remarks "They're overpriced. They don't have x-y-z features." Most infamous among the tech crowd was in the slashdot post covering the original release of the iPod:

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

To review, this is the device everyone now owns. But you knew that. Again, when Apple released the the iPod mini, many said "But the regular iPod, which we now accept as cool, costs 50 bucks more, with three times the storage."

Now Apple has released the tiny iPod nano, a super-thin replacement for the mini. It costs more per gig of storage than the mini. But it's small. It's like a gumPod (shuffle), but with a display and an actual click-wheel. So the cost grumblers have chimed in. Whatever. They're used to being wrong, I think. What really irks, me though, is the still prevalent meme that iPods are successful because they are stylish. I've never bought this argument, and I hope you don't either. It's worth arguing about, because this comes down to industrial and interface designs. The success of the iPod brings into sharp relief how poor these areas have been.

The iPod is not successful because it is pretty. It is successful because it is easy to use. The iPod is pretty because it is easy to use. They go together. The ease of use comes from many sources. In an age of blathering about convergence (don't get me started) iPods converge nothing. Sure, there are pictures. Sure, there are contacts and calendars. Hell, you can even run linux on the things. But all of that is fluff. No one buys an iPod because they think "Boy, at last I can have contacts on my music player." Nobody says this, because the interface for reading calendars and contacts on an iPod is terrible. The interface has one, and only one purpose: To find music you like so you can play it, and then think about something else.

When you look at an iPod, you see a display, and a widget area. All the controls are in the widget area, which is circular, as we all know. In fact, the controls are placed under the thumb, in such a way that it is easy to use the controls and see the screen at the same time. there are no buttons on the sides, nor on the back. There is a hold switch on top, but that's it. With an iPod, you always know where the buttons are. Under your thumb. Where you wanted them.

Does this make a pretty device? Very much so. But in many ways, this is good karma from usability. Try to imagine a better way to arrange things on a music playing device. Could you do it? Me, neither. Because the device is focused, there are no leftover buttons. There are no controls a user will never use. There isn't even an on/off switch. Use it, and it fires up. Leave it sit, paused, and it shuts itself off.

The other element of success is smallness. There is more to a portable device than the number of songs it will carry. Time and again, Apple has bet on smallness over capacity, and every time, Apple gets even richer. I'm telling you: I'm buying a Nano. And the reason is the smallness. I want room in my pocket, all the room I can get. In such cramped quarters, half an inch really does matter. I've gone from a full on iPod to a mini. I haven't missed the capacity much. That's what my laptop is for. But the compact size? Priceless.

And again, compactness is functional on a portable device. Somewhere in our minds, we've spliced form and function into separate, even antithetical goals. The iPod is a demonstration of the power of removing this distinction, of creating a device where the form and the function flow from each other. Form follows function, at least for Apple. Face it, nay-sayers, they're just good devices. So while the geeks grumble, Apple laughs all the way to the bank. And I buy new electronics. Personally, I'm grabbing the black one.