'Professional blogs...'

From Engadget's "Apple OS X Lion (10.7) review":

The [scrolling] inversion seems inspired by iOS, wherein flicking up a page will cause it to scroll down (take out your iPhone and try it, if you don't believe us).

It's certainly the case that the inversion of scrolling is a confusion at first, but surely this is the most convoluted and confused way of picturing scrolling on an iPhone there has ever been?

The popular analogy here is a piece of paper laid out on a desk -- in order to see more text on the top, you push it down, rather than up, with your fingers.

I thought the popular analogy was: if you want to move the content up, you move it up.

While in the Finder, for example, swiping three fingers from left to right brings up the Dashboard

No: while on the left-most space, swiping three fingers from left to right brings up the Dashboard, since the Dashboard sits to the left of your desktop spaces.

The Spotlight magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner now extends beyond system search, adding top results from the web, Wikipedia, and dictionary results to the list.

Umm, it did three-quarters of this in Snow Leopard already.

...the ability to navigate back and forth between websites by flicking the trackpad with two fingers, not unlike the single-finger swipe that works with mobile Safari.

Very unlike mobile Safari, since it doesn't have that feature.

And there was me thinking that I've only been using this new OS for 20 minutes, I don't really know enough to comment. I'll leave that to the professionals.

If you'd like a real review of Lion, I'd suggest you go to head to John Siracusa's over at Ars Technica. And put a pot of coffee on.

Simples, Not Circles.

I posted to Google+ last week a thinking-out-loud piece about circles on there, and that my first thought is that they're not what they are cracked up to be. Specifically, it feel like that if they were  just called 'lists' they would be exactly the same, except you wouldn't feel like you'd been promised more and been left wanting. As I hoped, it provided a great springboard for some thought-provoking comments, about what circles meant to each person, and there were some good points about how the metaphor promotes certain ways of thinking about their use, and the potential for fine-grained sharing and accountability. At the end of it all though, I still felt nonplussed (ahem), but for a different reason, well reasons. I thought that what I wanted from circles was intersections, Venn diagram views, circle-sharing and so on, but in fact what I want is so much simpler. I want to be able to search and filter as an information consumer, and I want to be able to share publicly or privately when being an information publisher.

As a consumer, circles are the wrong way around. One of the big changes to publishing in a post-internet world is that the barrier to publishing has gone, and so instead we use filtering after publishing to control the flow of data that reaches us. Circles force us to think about who we want to push our data to, as well as who we want to receive data from. Whilst that may be clever on paper, to me this is combining two paradigms, which for many (for me, at least) is just too much like hard work. Publishers used to do much of the filtering for us, so we could select an outlet and trust the information would be, for the most part, the sort of information we wanted. Then we got used to doing it ourselves, setting up our filters so that, for the most part, the got the information we wanted. One method at a time acts like a funnel, combining both acts like an information dam.

As a publisher, why so complex? When I post something on the internet, whether it's a message or a photo or a video or a piece of music or an article, I want to do one of two things. That's right: two. Either I'm publicly publishing, which means that I want as many people as possible to see what it is I'm publishing, or I'm communicating, which means that I want a small, select group of people to see whatever it is i'm sharing with them. In the first case, I'm putting something out there in the public domain for consumption, where I don't want to restrict it's readership: I want the reverse, I want the biggest audience I can find. In the second case, I'm communicating, privately, with one person, or a small select group. The communication is for their eyes only, and of course those people will know that. These people don't need telling not to 'reshare' what I've just sent to them: be it a personal message to my girlfriend, some photos to my parents, a business idea to a couple of close colleagues. In the former case though, publishing, of course I don't want to restrict others viewing or sharing. If I did, I wouldn't publish it.

To do these two things, I need two choices: publish (to the world) or communicate (to a group, maybe of one). That's it. And this can be done by having a blog and an email account. Or, just a Twitter account. Sure, there's room for improvement: email was never designed for threaded conversations: Twitter is often too restrictive. And there are certainly cases where being able to grow the group of people in a communication after it has started would be useful (it makes less sense to try and shrink the group). But circles are just far too complicated for my needs. Maybe I'm in the minority, that most people want to finely control exactly who can access each bit of data they put out there, but for me it's not complicated. It's either public, or its private: that's it. Everything after that is filtering.

24 Hours of iOS 5 (on an iPhone 3GS)

Yesterday morning, when the seed was finally live and the servers had finally recovered, I updated (well, restored) my trusty two year-old iPhone 3GS to iOS 5 Beta 1. Since then I have made calls, sent messages, listened to music, tweeted, planned journeys and made journeys. This is a brief summary of what I've found. Speed

It's no secret that the 3GS only just about copes with iOS 4. I certainly couldn't go back to version 3, but I do miss the snappiness that my phone had back then. Version 5 is pushing the ageing hardware even more, and this beta is just balancing on the usability line, occasionally falling off into a pit of hanging crashiness. Since there aren't really any new features that should really tax the hardware that iOS 4 didn't (apart from perhaps Notification Center) I'm going to put the rest down to this being an early beta, and that the bugs (and debugging code I assume is in there) are both to blame. If they're not, and the final release of iOS 5 on the 3GS is the same speed as this beta, it will be debatable whether this update is for all 3GS users.

Mail

I can flag mail! I can mark it as unread! And here's the best bit: weirdly formatted messages with tiny fonts and stupid forced line lengths get reformatted! No longer will I actually have to ignore someone's emails (there's a handful of people I know send mail like this – what is it that does it: Outlook, Blackberrys?)  just because of the chore of sideways scrolling that was necessary to read their unholyl rich-text musings.

And also: on the train with horrendous 3G coverage, mail was failing to send. The status bar at the bottom detailed these unsent messages until they successfully wooshed off, with an extra little vibrate too! Good, good.

Twitter

If you use Twitter, you'll love the integration. if you don't, I doubt it's going to bother you. It would be nice if the tweet menu items get hidden if you don't install the Twitter client (I haven't test this but it would make sense).

I took a photo, and tweeted it straight from the camera app without switching to Twitter: it uploaded it using Twitter's new photo sharing service. I located myself on the map on a train to Manchester, and direct from there tweeted my location. It's not rocket science, but all good, and not switching apps is always a boon on older hardware, as this is where some of the biggest slow-downs can occur.

Maps

If you're in the UK, you'll have no doubt spotted the option to plan a journey by public transport, only to be disappointed that it never seems to find anything. Now it does! Now it finds ridiculous journeys for you that you'd never use! Baby steps though. And I've just bought the LJP app anyway.

Notifications

A better notification system was needed the moment push notifications were introduced and turned out to be A Really Good Thing. Even if you only call and text, the updated home screen view is a big improvement, and after that day out when you return to your phone that you left at home, you have a much more structured list of tiresome tasks to complete.

Camera

You can now use the shutter button to increase the ringer volume on your phone. Finally.

Widgets

Ok, so no-one at Apple has admitted it yet, but see Weather and Stocks in Notification Center? they're widgets they are, and there's no getting away from it: there's gonna be a whole set of apps asking if they can put a widget up there in six months time.

And a good thing too. I just wish I could get rid of the damned Stocks one: not even deleting every stock I track has removed it yet, it stubbornly stays, empty, acting like a massive 'go to Yahoo!' button.

Music

A subtle change here: no longer will you find an iPod app on your phone, instead you'll find the much more sensibly-named Music app. At the moment Apple get a new word accepted by the common tongue then they distance themselves from it like a self-conscience teenager huffing at his uncool dad who's trying to use the word 'brap' in conversation.

UI

Not much going on here really, although maybe I'm being unobservant. The switch control (UISwitch) has gone from rectangular to round (steady on, Apple). Oh, and in iTunes on the Mac, the volume control has been updated a bit to be more metallic and shiny.

Summary

There's a few biggies here that in another 24 hours I'll wonder how I ever did without (NC, Twitter, Mail flagging) and there's a big bunch of tiny things that have been fixed or improved that will keep me happy for weeks to come. The one big downside is the speed issue, but this is beta 1, and this is a two year old phone, filled to capacity (32GB of apps and data, I make Mail access 5 accounts totalling 7GB of data, 2 years of text messages...). It would be interesting to see if these sorts of things rally affect performance, I doubt they do very much (apart maybe for the SMS messages), I suspect that the beta-ness, the debug and the interaction between applications that really affects speed. This will be the main thing I'll be watching as we move through the beta versions, but I suspect my advice for any 3GS owners wondering whether to upgrade when the time comes will be a hearty 'yes'.

Addendum

You can argue the pros and cons of pushing a new OS to all your users ad infinitum, including where you draw the line (there were iPhone 1 owners upset they couldn't have iOS 4, iPhone 3G owners upset they had to have iOS4...). Indeed the entire area of upgrade cycles of both hardware and software, and support for those systems, is very difficult to get right – I personally think Apple are actually very good at treading the middle path on this one (and yes, I've been on the losing side sometimes). WIth iOS 5 though, Apple have introduced delta upgrades to the OS, which means they can have much more control of how far they push new features to older hardware, which should help to soften the edge of the ever approaching upgrade cliff.