DesignAday

Activation

My wife and I just upgraded our original iPhones to the new 3GS. We both ended up having to call AT&T’s customer service to get them activated. My wife missed the Quick Start Guide included in the shipping box, so she didn’t realize that you had to activate the phone either online or by calling a number. I, however, followed the instructions, and it still didn’t work.

Step 1 says to leave the new phone off, explaining that turning your iPhone on could cause activation problems. Step 2 has you sync your phone with iTunes, though, which turns it on. Step 4 then has you visit a URL or call an automated system to accept your terms of service and activate the phone. I tried the web method, and it told me that my phone was activated. Unfortunately, the phone itself reported “No Service”. Then I tried calling the number. After it took me through a couple steps, it forwarded me to a service representative.

Apparently, both the old phone and the new phone have to be turned off at the time of activation, or it fails. AT&T made a slew of mistakes in the design of this activation process. Their instructions say nothing about turning off the old phone. The instructions explicitly state right off that “…you MUST follow these steps IN ORDER”, which doesn’t work, because it has you turn the phone on after telling you to leave it off. Finally, when the activation fails, the website tells you that it was successful. Apple got it right with the first version, where activation was handled directly through iTunes. It’s a shame they are now dependent on AT&T for this small, yet crucial, part of the process.

Apple does the right thing… eventually.

Saturday morning, I checked my email before heading to a rehearsal. When I returned home, around 11:00, I discovered that my network was down. I looked over at my Time Capsule to see that the light was off. The Time Capsule is Apple’s back-up device that works with Time Machine. It contains a hard drive (Mine is 1 TB.) and also acts as a wireless router. I have three Macs that back up to it hourly.

I tried unplugging the power cord and plugging it back in. I tried pressing the reset button. It would not power on. So, I used my iPhone to do a quick search, and I found some reports of first generation Time Capsules dying after about 18 months. I purchased mine in April of 2008, so that puts mine at about 19. Apparently the power supply, which is inside of the unit, can’t handle the heat produced by the device and goes bad. Of course, the warranty is only a year.

After I got my Verizon router configured to provide the network, I found these threads on the Apple discussion forums. It seems a lot of people have been having this issue, starting back in August. I ended up calling Apple Care, even though I don’t currently have an Apple Care policy on my machines. Once I explained that I was experiencing the same power supply issue that a lot of others have had, the representative took down by serial number and put me old hold while he looked it up. When he returned, he told me that Apple will be sending me a replacement unit free of charge.

This is a rather serious issue. People are using Time Capsules as their primary means of backup. They should be more dependable than this. That said, I only use it for backup, so I haven’t lost data. Some people simply use it as network attached storage.

It has taken Apple a few months to finally decide to do the right thing and replace units that are obviously suffering from a design flaw. Many customers who were victim to the issue early on have already hacked there units to install external power supplies, or to remove the drives so they could retrieve their data. They won’t be eligible for new units. Many people already replaced their Time Capsules.

Apple has decided to do the right thing, and I applaud them for that. Once again, they have won my loyalty and proven that they are a good and trustworthy company. I must question, however, if I would feel the same way had my unit gone belly up back in August.

Like Magic

I started using Apple’s new Magic Mouse today, and I absolutely love it. I find it very comfortable, a perfect weight, and with just enough resistance as it slides across my desktop. Of course, the best feature of it is the swipe to scroll. I really liked the scroll ball on my old Mighty Mouse, but this is a vast improvement. The scroll ball worked well, but just like the wheels, it could only scroll as far as your finger tip is long. This required you to move your index finger repeatedly to scroll down a page. With the swipe, you have the entire length of the mouse. On top of that, they have added momentum scrolling, like on the iPhone, so that a good swipe can send your page scrolling quite a distance. Also, the scroll ball would collect gunk over time and stop working. Then you would have to turn the mouse upside down and rub it rapidly back and forth on a piece of paper to clean it. That will not be a problem with the Magic Mouse’s touch surface.

Apple has received a lot of criticism over the years for its mouse designs. This one is a winner—likely the best mouse ever. Of course, I’ve been partial to Apple’s mice, so make of my review what you will.

Foiled Again!

Please excuse me for wrapping up the week with another post related to my new MacBook Pro. It probably seems rather quaint to all of you that have been using laptops, but I am rubbing my wrists, freed from the shackles of a desktop, so it’s on my mind.

I’m on a short business trip and will be participating in a meeting with a customer. I have a few slides to present and can finally do it from my own laptop, rather than handing somebody else a thumb drive. I stopped at Tyson’s Corner on my way here to visit, as I understand it, the very first Apple Store and pick up a mini display port to VGA adapter, so I can plug into the projector. I happily created my slides in Keynote, instead of that other program, and I purchased the Keynote Remote iPhone app. It’s a nifty little tool that lets me control the show over a WiFi network. You just swipe to change slides backwards or forwards. It also displays your notes, if you need them.

I was quite satisfied with myself. Then I realized that my meeting is on a military base. I’m not allowed to have my phone in the building.

I guess I’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.

In the Details: Lefty

I was working on my new MacBook Pro today and connected my mouse—there’s no way I’m using a trackpad to do real work. All of the ports on this model are on the left side (as you face it). I’m right-handed, so my mouse cord had to wrap all the way around the back of the laptop. The cords on Apple’s mice are designed to be the perfect length to plug into a port on the back of the keyboard and no longer. It made it around, but I was constantly pulling on it, like a dog on a short leash.

So, is the USB port placement sub-optimal, the mouse cord length stingy, or should I take the blame for using a corded mouse when the best solution is obviously to buy a wireless mouse and throw money away on batteries?

Lap Happy

For 18 years, I’ve been using Mac desktop computers. I started on an LCII, then got a PowerMac 6100/60. After that was an 8500, followed by a G4, a G5, and finally the Mac Pro I’m writing this on. The Macs I’ve used at work have followed a similar path, although there was a Cube in there. My G5 at work was getting long in the tooth, and it finally came my turn to upgrade. This time, I opted for a MacBook Pro.

There are a number of good reasons behind this decision, and they can mostly be covered by explaining why I have never been interested in a laptop before. Power was a significant factor in the past. Processor speed, memory, and drive space were all concerns that are no longer an issue. The biggest reason has been screen real estate. I’ve been using two displays at home since I put a second video card in the 8500. I started using two displays at work about 7 years ago. I just can’t get along with a single display (although Spaces helps). Of course, the Mac laptops drive a second display now. In fact, the 15.4” widescreen display on my new MacBook is higher resolution than the cheap, 17” Dell LCDs I have at my office. Finally, I’ve been attending more meetings than I used to, and it’s inconvenient to have to take everything I think I’ll need on a thumb drive and then ask to use somebody else’s PC laptop to show my slides. It’s even a little embarrassing at times to be the only one at the conference table that pulls out a legal pad to take notes. I’ve had customers rib me about it on multiple occasions.

So now I have a laptop, and I’m realizing all of the accessories I need to get for it. I just ordered a bag, a mini-display port to VGA adapter, and the Keynote iPhone app. Let me know what else I need.

Here’s to going mobile!

Flashing the iPhone?

For whatever reason, Apple has not allowed an Adobe Flash plug-in on the iPhone. If you visit a website that has Flash content, tough beans. You’ll see a box with a big “no” icon. I must also assume that Apple has disallowed a Flash player iPhone application, as that would be a no-brainer for Adobe. Now Adobe has done something really interesting.

Flash has become a standard platform for many reasons, one of them being that it is accessible to designers. We don’t need a degree in computer science to build interactive applications using it. Adobe is leveraging that advantage by turning Flash Professional CS5 into a development environment for iPhone applications. You can build an application within Flash just as you currently do for the web and then export it as an iPhone app that can be submitted to Apple’s App Store. And this isn’t theoretical. At MAX 2009, they demonstrated several apps built in a prerelease version that are currently available for download on the App Store. A public beta is planned for later this year.

This is going to open up iPhone development to an even wider range of developers. I think it was a brilliant move on Adobe’s part. Flash could very well become the most popular platform for iPhone development.

Update: Okay, maybe it isn’t so interesting as I thought. You don’t have access to any of the native iPhone UI. That means you have to implement everything in Flash: swiping, pinching, momentum-scrolling, etc. Good luck trying to get the exact feel of native applications. Here’s more information about the limitations from Jeff Rock (and a tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for pointing it out).

In the Details: Alarming iCal

Apple’s iCal allows you to set multiple alarms for any event. There are many notification options to choose from, and it provides a list of past settings for quick reuse, so in many ways it is quite a robust feature. You can specify the alarm to go off minutes, hours, or days before or after the event. But there is one small detail that often annoys me. If I select “hours before”, it won’t allow me to enter hours and minutes. Nor will it allow me to enter a decimal, so I can’t specify “two hours and thirty minutes”, for example. For that, I have to do the math in my head and enter “150 minutes”. No, it isn’t difficult math, but this is an interaction that is needlessly complex simply because of the way they decided to implement the form.

Cursed Cursors

I’ve done a fair amount of UI design for applications intended for use on tablet PCs. That means that the software is running on Microsoft’s tablet version of Windows. It has a number of additional features, such as a pop-up keyboard and handwriting recognition, that is specific to stylus and finger input. Typical of Microsoft, however, they haven’t really thought through the details. One thing that has always bugged me is the cursor. If I’m using a stylus, I have no need for a cursor whatsoever. The cursor is a stand-in for direct manipulation. That is, it represents your finger when you have to use something like a mouse to interact with the UI indirectly. On a touch screen, you can tap things—there is no click.

The cursor is superfluous, yet Microsoft left it there. Every time you tap, the cursor jumps to that point on the screen. This often leaves it hovering over a button, and what does that end up doing? Well, for one, it partially obscures whatever icon or label is on the button. Even worse, it usually causes a tooltip to pop up, as the cursor just stays there. The tooltip remains, covering whatever portion of the display it happens to cover, until the standard timeout is reached, or until you tap somewhere else, moving the cursor to a new location. Tooltips are not an interaction design pattern intended for touch interfaces. I guarantee you will not find tooltips in the iPhone UI.

I received email today from Apple’s App Store advertising the latest iPhone apps. I got excited to see that LucasArts has released The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition for the iPhone. The original was the very first game I purchased for the Macintosh—my LCII. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and I was ready to buy it, but I read the reviews first. Every one that I read complained about the UI. Apparently, they didn’t adapt the UI for the iPhone. Rather than just tapping things, you actually have to drag a cursor around the screen!

Epic Fail!

In the Details: ADDress

Occasionally, people get new email addresses. They may have changed jobs or switched ISPs. Whatever the reason, I will receive an email from them stating that they have a new email address and asking that I no longer use the old one. So, in Mail, I right-click the new address to open the contextual menu. One of the options is to add the address to an existing contact. This then opens the contact card of the person that sent the email directly within the Mail app. I can specify whether it is a work or home address.

Unfortunately, it won’t let me delete the existing address. To do that, I have to open Address Book, which completely defeats the purpose of the feature in Mail. In this case, Apple has not fully thought through the various use cases for this otherwise quite useful feature.