Category: Products and Design

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Products and Design

Wordle and achieving intuitiveness through good design

From an Ars Technica profile of the creator of the currently popular word-guessing game Wordle. When he first put form to his idea,

Wardle realized something wasn’t right when he dumped a massive list of every possible five-letter word into the app’s random-word pool:

“It turns out that these are all valid five-letter words,” Wardle says while displaying the above image, drawing a laugh from the crowd. After testing the worst outliers in his game, he had a revelation:

When players encounter a word they’ve never heard of or used in common speech, they are left with little rational means of guessing what the next letter might be, even as grays, greens, and yellows accumulate.

“What’s fun about Wordle, I think, is what you can tease out, based on what you know about language,” Wardle says. “What the word should be.”

The design solution came thanks to Wardle’s partner “going through a tough time” and wanting a “mindless game to play.” So he turned her into a human machine-learning model by having her rank every single five-letter word in the dictionary—roughly 13,000 of them—with the following ranking system:

So – Wordle’s balance of challenge and intuitiveness is a result of deliberate design choices. One is this above, excluding unfamiliar yet legitimate words. The other is

the very particular design choice to limit it to one puzzle a day, so that everyone around the world is solving the same Wordle. A strong social facet of a game that has no intrinsic social game-play at all

– RG.org post from February 2022.
Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

Everything is on high-speed internet. Why are we seeing wait spinners all the time?

In this blog post about offline-first, this important point:

Latency is more important than bandwidth

In the past, often the bandwidth was the limiting factor on determining the loading time of an application. But while bandwidth has improved over the years, latency became the limiting factor. You can always increase the bandwidth by setting up more cables or sending more Starlink satelites to space. But reducing the latency is not so easy…

Offline first applications benefit from that because sending the inital state to the client can be done much faster with more bandwidth. And once the data is there, we do no longer have to care about the latency to the backend server.

This is why iOS Background App Refresh, when implemented well, works like magic. iCloud Tabs in Safari are a great example of this:

Safari doesn’t stop you from using the browser while it syncs tabs. In fact, if it detects that the connection isn’t good enough to fetch tabs from other devices quickly enough, it just won’t show you the “From {device name}” section.

Safari continues to attempt to sync tabs in the background, where you’re using the browser or not. When it’s synced, the section shows up. Like magic.

iCloud photos is another example of offline first; there is never any wait time while you use the same photo library across multiple iOS and Mac devices.

Likewise the podcast app Overcast will download podcasts and sync subscriptions silently in the background.

In both cases, the developers have designed for the fact that bandwidth over time is abundant, but when the user launches the app, (lack of) latency is important, so the apps don’t sync right then.

Of course, conflict resolution is an important part of offline-first, and today many applications do this at a file level. The interface’ll ask you which version (from another device or from the local device) you want to use.

Other, more intelligent applications will do this within a file. A text editor like TextMate on MacOS detects that a file that is open in the editor has been changed on the filesystem because it was edited on another device and has synced via, say, iCloud or Dropbox. The editor then uses markup to highlight the conflicting text.

Either way, the application won’t stop you from using it until it can determine everything is synced, which often isn’t possible quickly.

Unfortunately, too many apps today rely on calling home at every launch, even if it isn’t to sync files. Compare the launch of the image creation app Canva and the Twitter app Tweetbot (both cold launches). You can see which one loads existing content first and then start looking to sync. Its clear which one feels more snappy:

Canva
Tweetbot

Whether your users are on a phone perpetually connected to 4G, a desktop plugged into gigabit Ethernet, a laptop with patchy wifi, or a tablet with no available connections nearby, an offline first app gives them confidence that it’ll be available instantly when they need it. To capture text. Review a photo. Add a contact. Or even browse the web.

(ends)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Products and Design The Dark Forest of the Internet

Preserving the web that matters to us

A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now “rotten”, or no longer accessible. The older the web page, the more likely it is that the articles it links to no longer exist. This chart makes it clear:

The internet is decentralised by design. That means no single entity decides whether a given article on the web is taken down.

But that also means that no single entity can ensure that that article can stay up. If the owner of the domain dies, forgets to renew, or simply chooses not to, it’s gone. The Internet archive can’t archive every single web page that ever existed.

That means it is up to each of us to preserve, privately, those parts of the web that matter to each of us.

I am personally a long-time user of both Instapaper and Pocket (from when they were personal projects of their creators), and have thousands of articles in each. Should either of these services shut down, I will be able to export my saved articles. For articles and web pages with more significant personal value, I also have a folder full of markdown-formatted versions of them. I ended up creating an iOS Siri Shortcut to automate this, which I use every day.

Other ways are to save the full text in Evernote, or OneNote, or Notion using their browser extensions, and they’ll be available to you as long as these services are active. You could also copy the web page, paste it in an email and mail it to yourself, creating a library within email. Which again is accessible – and searchable! – as long as you have access to that email address. There’s no perfect solution.

The important take-away here is that what makes the Internet resilient as a whole makes it fragile at a microscopic level. Saving bookmarks alone is no guarantee that you’ll be able to access something on the web later. You’ll need to save the page itself, and find a system for this that works for you.

Categories
Discovery and Curation Products and Design

The trade-off between the paper book and Kindle book reading experience. Ps: they’re both great

This article I read a little while ago argues that people comprehend print books better than e books. It makes its case using this example:

… a 2018 experiment in which students visited a museum and looked at paintings. Some were asked simply to observe. Some were asked to take photographs. Some were asked to both take photographs and distribute them via Snapchat. The group that later remembered the paintings best comprised those who simply observed and took no photos. “The very process of taking photos,” Baron writes, “interferes with the cognitive act of viewing.”

This isn’t the same as reading on a Kindle device, which is distraction-free – as much as any paper book. Perhaps the writer means reading on iPads and phones. These are constantly connected, run many apps and interrupt your reading with notifications. In that case, the article title is misleading: “A Book You Remember, a Kindle You Forget”

Other semantics in the article like “reading” a book versus “using” a book – to contrast paper books and e books – don’t help either: a linguist quoted in the article uses these terms to compare the serendipity of finding passages when you thumb through a book with the ‘ego centric’ searching through of an e book. I could not possibly count the number of times I have simply given up looking for a passage in a paper book because it was impractical to thumb through. Or the number of times I have plodded through a story despite forgetting a detail about a character because it was too hard to look up. Search makes this possible.

Of course thumbing through a paper book, especially a collection of short stores or articles, doesn’t translate well to the e book world. In my view that’s an example of the tradeoffs we make when we move from one medium to another. (And, secondarily, the stagnation of innovation in digital publishing)

Here are more such tradeoffs, either way:

With a paper book I’m stuck with the font, size, margins, and so on – aesthetic decisions the publisher has made. I can change each of these on a Kindle to make reading convenient, because these are ergonomic decisions for me.

I highlight and revisit passages in Kindle books vastly more than with print books. That improves my recollection of parts I found significant.

There is a romance to carrying a paper book around, each of us sneaking a peek at what our fellow citizens are reading. In comparison Kindles are identical, antiseptic. Even with the recent software update that displays the title of the book on the Home Screen.

Few experiences beat reading a book outdoors, whether paper or Kindle. This was in eight degree celsius weather and worth every shiver.

But with a Kindle you’re carrying dozens of books at once and reading several simultaneously. With the (as of this writing, latest) Kindle Paperwhite with Bluetooth you can also listen to audiobooks (I bought the 32GB one with LTE & Wifi refurbished for nearly ⅓ off).

The 2018 Kindle Paperwhite

There is also a romance to having one’s personal library in bookcases of one’s choice instead of in, say, software like Apple Books or Calibre that lives in your computer(s). Once again, you give up portability and flexibility.

Then, the social experience of lending and borrowing books does not translate well to our tightly DRM-controlled e book world today. Perhaps this will change.

I think what we lose most of all is serendipity. There’s been much written about this including in the article. We have no meaningful digital equivalent of public libraries. No bookstores that you can lounge in on benches, floors or on footstools. There is no equivalent of Bangalore’s Blossom or New York’s Strand.

Tradeoffs.

Categories
Data Custody Products and Design The Next Computer

What you own and what you don’t

I learnt about this case today

A crucial decision came in 1993 when the Ninth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled in MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer Inc. that the local, impermanent copy of an operating system that is loaded into a computer’s RAM upon its booting up — a necessary component of a computer’s operation — is, by virtue of making a copy of intellectual property (the operating system), subject to copyright law. This “deeply stupid ruling,” Fairfield tells Vox, laid a trap, making the use of any software (broadly meaning nearly anything used on a computer system) a copyright violation unless the user followed rules set unilaterally by the manufacturer and/or seller. “That was the case that handed the keys to the kingdom to these companies,” Fairfield says. 

These legal principles have carried over to the so-called Internet of Things, in which tangible objects are embedded with copyrighted software (a.k.a. smart devices, like smart refrigerators and televisions and cars). 

– The erosion of personal ownership

This turns out to be the foundation of the legality of having ‘smart’ devices be technically owned by the manufacturer even after you have paid full price for them. This is what makes it legal – in the US at least – for manufacturers of these devices to remotely disable them, restrict their functionality, make it illegal for you to edit or repair their software, even when the manufacturer itself no longer considers it viable to support the device.

The article I quoted above is a detailed, well-considered take on the matter of not just smart devices, but personal ownership itself. Worth a read.

We have discussed smart devices many times on this site.

We have also discussed being mindful of data custody in the 21st century.

Both are issues to consider the next time you’re looking to purchase a gadget, appliance, car – anything that has electronics in it, really. In the 21st century, the stakes for caveat emptor or buyer beware are much higher.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

Our obsession with Thin and Light

[Apple’s annual environmental report] speaks of the Apple Pencil stylus as though it contains secrets lost in some fragment of the Rosetta Stone. The company is “designing, developing and testing additional disassembly tools — including new methods for recovering materials from Apple Pencil,” it says, as though the methods could only be reverse-engineered, rather than integrated from the very first stage of design.

– Your Smartphone Should Be Built to Last

It is only decades later that the full cost of our obsession with Thin and Light will be apparent. By then it will be too late.

Here are some posts I have written on this before:

An alternative future where we could Ship-of-Theseus our laptops
This ten year old Macbook Air
Oldie but goodie
Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Products and Design The Next Computer

The Mighty browser and web bloat

The Mighty browser, recently unveiled, “lets you have more tabs while taking 10x less memory” because it “streams your browser from a powerful computer in the cloud”.

Here’s how it works:

Mighty designed a custom server to “keep costs low,” built a low-latency networking protocol, and forked Chromium to “integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines.”…

Each browser instance is powered by “16 vCPUs” running on dual Intel Xeon processors that clock up to 4GHz, Nvidia GPUs, and 16GB of RAM.

This cloud implementation is said to let you load anywhere from “50+” to “hundreds of tabs without it stalling, freezing, and slowing down your computer

This reminds me of the Opera Mini browser I used to use on my Nokia N series phones. It pre-rendered web pages on a server before sending a compressed end result to my phone:

Unlike straightforward web browsers, Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server, renders it using the Presto layout engine, and reformats web pages into a format more suitable for small screens.

A page is compressed, then delivered to the phone in a markup language called Opera Binary Markup Language (OBML), which Opera Mini can interpret.

According to Opera Software, the data compression makes transfer time about two to three times faster,[29] and the pre-processing improves the display of web pages not designed for small screens.

As someone who uses ten year old laptops as my daily machines, I also can’t help but agree with this:

https://twitter.com/notnullnotvoid/status/1387093359806853127

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Ian Battaglia/Unsplash)

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

“A computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products”

The opportunity for competition exists” is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, invested aggressively in it, from silicon to security and everyone got caught with their pants down.

– Comment on Hacker News.

This was in a discussion about Apple’s successor chip to the M1. This comment acknowledges that the company’s success is more than simply slick marketing and product pricing. They have tackled a hard engineering problem, optimised for performance (and power consumption) over compatibility, and have _also_ packaged it well.

Categories
Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Tools are passive. Toys are not.

Our phones remain as powerful as ever, but every utilitarian function they have is compromised by the presence of these weirdly magnetic recreational functions. I can appreciate a slick, portable multi-tool, but I no longer want to carry in my pocket the most compelling toy ever created.

– Smartphones Are Toys First, Tools Second, David Cain/Raptitude

Apps on your phone with which you work and create are rarely designed to be addictive. Your camera, text editor, photo and video editors, sketch apps have gotten astoundingly capable. Ultimately, though, they are passive tools at your service.

The recreational apps that David speaks of – well they are a different kettle of fish. They’ve been deliberately designed to pull you in and then keep you there. For most of us, they dominate our smartphone and tablet usage. They actively change our very behaviour.

The only way to keep this from happening is to be aware and deliberate, day by day, about how we use our phones and tablets. iOS and Android now have built-in tracking of how long we use what apps. The key is to consciously review that data and act on what you see without criticising yourself.

Categories
Data Custody Products and Design The Next Computer

The tragedy of iTunes

An exasperated look at Apple Music in the Music app in Mac OS Catalina. The Music app is one successor to iTunes; the Podcasts app and the Finder itself being the others.

It’s extremely disappointing that the Apple of 2020 thought the Music app was good enough to release. It’s even worse that it continues to think so.

Mojave is the last Mac OS release that iTunes will run on. I have nearly twenty years of music carefully collated in iTunes, with hundreds of custom and smart playlists, album art, ID3 tags manually added across thousands of files. Having these corrupted, or not being able to reliably play, arrange and sync these would be a crushing loss.

The loss of iTunes is the most important reason why I won’t update any of my Macbooks to beyond Mojave (in fact, all but one run High Sierra).

Ultimately, I’m on the lookout for an open source desktop music management application for Mac OS that either syncs to the iOS music app or to a third-party music player. I realise I cannot keep putting off updates. Sooner or later I will need to; if only because my Macs are on average close to ten years old.