DesignAday

Skeuomorphism: the good, the bad, and the ugly

I’m really getting tired of hearing people complain about skeuomorphic user interfaces, especially tech journalists that don’t understand what they’re discussing. Podcasts on the TWiT network (yes, I’m looking at you, Leo) have been especially annoying. So, here’s an example. The next time you hear somebody complain about Apple’s skeuomorphic leather stitching, please send them here.

The Ugly
This is Apple’s much maligned Notes app from the iPad. There are a lot of people that strongly dislike the visual aesthetic. Some people like it, perhaps because it is familiar or it resonates with past experiences and sensations. Other people don’t care one way or another. For the most part, this is a matter of personal taste. As I’ve explained before, this is fashion. It’s also a bit of branding, and a case can be made that the visual design of the application has some utility, as it immediately communicates which application you are using. Many people seem to have just taken an intractable stance against skeuomorphic designs because it’s currently hip to do so, but for the most part, there is no negative effect on the usability of the application. The stitching is purely decoration, but there is a good reason for providing some amount of margin between the interactive components and the edge of the screen. The notepad doesn’t require a binding, but it benefits from a title bar, the height of which is based on the size of the button that resides within it. The one skeuomorphic treatment that is wasteful is the pocket on the left. It serves no functional purpose, and it takes up a significant chunk of what could be usable space. If you had a lot of notes, the pocket would obscure two (and part of a third) that you would otherwise be able to see and tap on.

The Bad
This is the iPhone app Metronome by MarketWall. It is almost completely skeuomorphic. It looks like a traditional, mechanical metronome. To set the tempo, you have to drag the weight up and down the arm. To start the metronome, you drag the arm to one side and release it. The arm animates back and forth just as on a mechanical metronome, and it makes a ticking sound. Now, you can like or dislike the visual design of it. When I first saw it, I thought, “Oh, that’s cute,” and I enjoyed playing with it briefly. But then when I had to actually use it, I immediately realized that it is a poorly designed application. It is really difficult to get the weight to the exact tempo you want to set. Some tempos I couldn’t get at all. It was really frustrating. The application is hard to use because it is limited by the constraints of the physical object and it’s translation as a skeuomorph.

The Good
This is Pro Metronome, an iPhone app by EUMlab. The visual design of this UI is also skeuomorphic, imitating a handheld, electronic metronome. It is designed to mimic a physical object with an LCD screen, beveled buttons, and a click wheel similar to a classic iPod. This is unnecessary, and the screen-within-a-screen is downright silly, but it isn’t detrimental to usability. The click wheel, however, is actually a very good interface for setting the tempo. You can quickly get to the tempo you want, and the control is fine enough to easily adjust the tempo by single digits. I find it preferable to other methods of entering a tempo (e.g. numeric keypad, increment/decrement buttons). Furthermore, I immediately knew how to use it—a primary benefit of a skeuomorphic UI.

My point here is that there are two distinct ways to critique skeuomorphism. One is purely aesthetic, and if you are critiquing the aesthetics, than realize that you are making a personal judgment based on your own tastes and prejudices. This is not a basis by which to declare skeuomorphism as good or bad. The other way to critique skeuomorphism is to consider it’s functionality. Is it making the product easier to understand? Is it obscuring information? Does it actually result in an ineffective UI? Asking such questions will result in an intelligent analysis of the design.

Designer’s Toolbelt: iMac

I’ve now had my new 27” iMac for a couple months, so I think it’s time to give a short review. The screen is absolutely gorgeous. It is, bar none, the best computer display I’ve eve seen. It’s bright, sharp, and the colors are brilliant. It makes the two older Apple LCDs that straddle it seem dim and muddy, and I’ve always considered them to be good displays. Of course, it’s huge, which is fantastic for both Photoshop and World of Warcraft.

The iMac is fast. I beefed up the RAM and the graphics card, and I got the top-of-the-line processor, so I would expect it to be, but I think the Fusion Drive is making a big difference. That’s the hybrid drive that intelligently combines solid state storage with a standard mechanical drive, automatically moving the most often used files and applications onto the solid state portion for optimized performance. System startup and application launching is noticeably speedy.

There is no DVD drive. So far, this has not been a problem. I still have an iMac in the house with a DVD drive, and it’s set up to share it, so the one or two times that I’ve had to mount removable media have been a very minor annoyance.

The biggest issue was the removal of the Firewire ports. My Drobo was connected to the Mac Pro via Firewire, but it is now connected to one of the iMac’s USB ports. I’ve definitely observed a decrease in its performance, especially when starting iPhoto or when the screensaver kicks in and accesses my photo library on it. I also had an external Firewire hard drive that I’m currently not able to use.

Eventually, I hope to make more use of Thunderbolt, but it only has two of those ports, which are currently occupied by two 20” Apple Cinema Displays. So far, I haven’t seen any good options for a Thunderbolt hub. I’m sure there will be such a thing eventually, but they’ll likely be expensive.

In conclusion, I’m very happy with my purchase. I consider it to be a professional-grade machine, and I expect it to serve me well for the next four years or so.

In the Details: Side Barred

One of the fundamental changes of the new iTunes is the removal of the side bar. The side bar has been one of the defining features of OS X applications. iMovie, iPhoto, Mail, and a plethora of third party applications sport a side bar that contains some type of categorization of the available content. In iTunes, the side bar presented major sections of the application, such as Music, Movies, and Podcasts. It also listed devices that content could be synched with, such as iPhones and iPads. It provided access to the iTunes Store, shared libraries on other computers, and playlists, which could be categorized by folders. New items could be added to the library by dragging them into the side bar, and items in the library could be dragged into playlists in the side bar.

Now, the side bar isn’t gone; it’s just hidden by default. You can turn it back on by selecting it in the View menu. However, I suggest giving iTunes a fair chance without it first. The revised UI does a pretty good job covering for it. The one thing that I assumed was going to be more difficult was adding tracks to playlists. Before, I was able to quickly grab a track, drag it to the side bar, and drop it into a playlist. Of course, I needn’t have worried. Dragging a track, regardless of where you are in your library, will cause a list of playlists to slide in from the right side of the screen. This gives you the convenience of the sidebar when you need it without holding the screen real estate hostage.

In the Details: Color

Apple released a new version of iTunes, and while I haven’t spent an enormous amount of time with it yet, there is one bit of polish that I’m probably overly impressed with. In the new album view, clicking an album results in a detail view directly below, much like a group of apps opens in iOS.

This is a superior method of presentation that retains context and doesn’t require any fiddly UI bits. Beyond that, it is done so beautifully. They use the album art on the right side, slightly faded, and they pick the predominant color from the left edge of the album art to use as the background, blending the art into it. That is a brilliant piece of visual design, but it becomes apparent just how clever they are being when you select the album Sounds of Earth.

iTunes is actually sampling the colors in the album art to select the colors for the text, creating an entire color scheme for the album display with appropriate contrast for readability. This is visual user interface design at its best. Kudos to the designers and engineers that thought of this and made it work. It’s beautiful.

Tough Decision

It’s time to upgrade. My Mac Pro is four years old. It’s still getting the job done, but applications like iMovie and iPhoto are definitely taxing it lately. Having to quit every other application before importing video is a drag. Time Machine backups bring it to its knees. I had been planning on replacing it with one of the brand new iMacs that will be available next month.

However, the new corporate policies put in place since the acquisition of my company won’t allow me to continue using my company MacBook Pro for teaching my class or presenting at conferences. As much as I prefer a desktop for serious work (and gaming), I need a laptop. If it were only presentations I had to worry about, I could get by with an iPad, but I don’t think I can run my January workshop about production ready CSS off of one.

Typically, I would buy a new computer that’s going to last me about four years. I’ve upgraded the RAM in my MacPro, but it otherwise boasts the same specs as when I bought it. I’m not going to be able to upgrade anything in a MacBook Pro, so I need to decide whether to completely trick it out with the intent of getting four years out of it, or go for a low price with the intent of replacing it in half the time.

I’d prefer to go for the latest, Retina display model and max out the processor, RAM, and flash drive. That’s really the only way to get the specs higher than my old Mac Pro (although I realize that there’s a lot more to the performance than Ghz and GBs). But sheesh, that’s expensive! And how much am I actually going to be using that little 15” Retina display? I use two 20” Cinema displays at my desk.

On top of all that, I was planning on selling the Mac Pro to Gazelle for $300, but I’m probably going to have to keep it around to serve up my music, movies, and photos, as the laptop won’t be here running all the time.

Another option would be to buy the iMac as my primary machine and then get the cheapest Air to use on the road. That might just be less expensive than a top of the line MacBook Pro. I may have to wait until December to find out what customizable options they are offering on the iMac.

Yes, I know, first world problems. So it’s not the end of the world. What would you do?

iCloud Tabs

In the latest updates to iOS and Mac OS, Apple introduced a new feature within Safari. There is now a button in desktop Safari’s toolbar for iCloud Tabs. Clicking on it opens a popover that lists all of the browser tabs open on every device registered with iCloud. As I type this, it lists all of the pages I have open on my iPhone.

In Mobile Safari, the feature is accessed through a folder in the Bookmarks list. There, it currently lists the Tumblr page I’m typing this into, as well as a couple other tabs I have open. It’s an extremely useful feature, more so the more devices you use on a regular basis.

Forecast is iCloudy

I’ve been experimenting with iTunes Match recently, and thus far, I don’t find it to be particularly useful. I reached this conclusion due to a few basic issues:

1. It’s on or off. When it is turned on, my iPhone won’t synch music with iTunes on my desktop. In fact, all of the synching options are hidden. This meant that all of the tracks that I had on the phone when I first turned on iTunes Match were still on the phone. I would have to go through and delete them individually to remove them. The only way to put new music on the phone was to download it by track or by playlist. I learned that once you press the download button for an entire playlist, the only way to cancel the download is to press the stop button on each individual track, which would be a lot of tapping for a 2,000+ song playlist. Or, you can turn off iTunes Match, which is what I did.
2. I have over 10,000 tracks in my iTunes library. Obviously, they won’t all fit on my iPhone. So, I have created a smart playlist that automatically removes songs I’ve listened to recently and adds songs that I haven’t. So, every time I synch my iPhone, play counts and dates are updated. Then the music I’ve listened to is cleared off of the phone and replaced by music I haven’t heard in a while. I have also created several playlists that further filter the “not recently played” list so that, for example, I can listen to up-beat, singable songs while I’m driving without one of Bach’s cello suites coming on. This doesn’t work with iTunes Match, because it doesn’t support playlists that include other playlists. And, while the playlist itself updates, it doesn’t change what music is locally stored on the phone, which brings me to the final point.
3. I’m not going to pay more for a data plan that will be big enough to cover streaming music every day. So, I can only play the music that is on the device, unless I’m on a WiFi network. So, I can’t synch music on or off the device, and I can’t usually listen to music that isn’t on the device.

With the only options being on or off, I’ve chosen “off”.

Routed

I had to drive down to Quantico yesterday to present a visionary scenario at the NCIS headquarters, so I tried out Apple’s new Maps app with spoken turn-by-turn directions. Overall, it worked well, but there is one glaring issue I encountered.

It initially presented me with three routes to choose from, and I selected route 3, which might take a few minutes longer, but would avoid the D.C. beltway and would be more scenic. I tested the app’s ability to reroute right away by making a slight detour to fill my tank. It didn’t miss a beat, giving me new directions within seconds after I turned left, instead of right. It wasn’t until after I had left the PA Turnpike, eaten dinner, and reached the exit where route options 1 and 3 branched that I discovered the problem. Apparently, when the app rerouted me, it remapped the entire route, defaulting to route 1. It isn’t smart enough to remember that I had specifically selected route 3.

That should be easy enough to fix, but it’s the kind of detail I expect Apple to get right the first time.

My Intent to Break the Law

Thanks to a fictional article from a British tabloid, people are thinking about what happens to our digital media when we die. I’ve spent quite a lot of money on music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, ebooks, games, and applications. The typical service agreement states that you haven’t purchased a copy of the file, as you do when you buy physical media, but a license to use it. This license expires when you do. So, it is unlawful to give your digital media to somebody else, regardless of whether or not you are in a position to use it. I have a problem with this.

First of all, the fact that a song or book is a digital file on my hard drive, rather than ink on paper or even a file on a CD, should make no difference whatsoever. I can pass my printed books, CDs, and DVDs on to my children; why shouldn’t I do the same with the digital versions? The distinction is nonsensical.

Furthermore, my digital media is now a conglomeration of purchases from iTunes and Amazon mixed with ripped CDs. And, since I’ve subscribed to iCloud Music Match, many of the ripped tracks have been replaced with Apple’s files.

So, I have every intention of leaving my media library, physical and digital, to my family members. Given that most of those files have no DRM, I don’t believe there will be any way for said companies to know. That said, I fully believe that by the time I die, digital rights and service agreements will advance to treat digital media more like we currently treat physical media. So, don’t sue me just yet.

Charging for a Bug

Do you remember my complaints last month about Apple’s Podcasts app chewing through my wife’s data allowance and costing me $15? Well, that’s not the half of it. I’ve been trying to track down the culprit that has been causing my wife and I both to significantly exceed our data plan limits in July and August. At first, based on AT&T’s reports, I thought something was causing enormous cellular data downloads in the middle of the night, even though the phone was on my WiFi network and plugged into power. I finally figured out, however, that AT&T only checks the phone’s data use occasionally, and reports it all in one chunk at the time it checks. So, I was actually seeing an entire day’s worth of data use logged in the middle of the night. Still, I had to figure out why I was burning through as much as 70 MBs in a day.

I tried an application called DataMan, but it only told me how much was being used, not which app was using it. Then, this morning, after learning that I had once again exceeded my quota, I found My Data Manager, which graphs the data user per application. I installed it and got it set up. After my morning commute, I checked it to find that the Podcasts app had used about 20 MBs since I left my house. I had been listening to a podcast all the way to work, but the audio file is on my iPhone. Podcasts knows that it is there, because it isn’t showing the download button beside it.

Apparently, it is ignoring the fact that I have the file locally, and it is streaming it over the cellular network!

That does it. I’m trashing the Podcasts app and going back to listening to my Podcasts in the Music app. This bug has probably cost me around $100 in unnecessary data use.