Also, no one’s told me off yet. So that’s good.

First off, Kars sent me some Hubbub stickers a while back. They’ve only just arrived. Here they are:

Then, Rowan threatened to send me some Twilight stickers. Which he did.

Rowan is allowed to send me Twilight stickers because he is a very old friend and I know where he lives.

Finally, I got a sad Keanu from @culturalelite and @nationstudio.

So. What does the laptop look like now?

It’s annotated on Flickr if you’re into that kind of thing.

Send me more! But obviously smaller ones. It’s getting a bit crowded.

My old laptop used to look a bit like this. I was very proud of the stickers on it, especially the light-up Eve.

My new laptops (work and personal)  look a bit like this. There’s a nice Newspaper Club sticker on it that Ben gave me, but otherwise, it’s looking a bit boring.

So. Send me stickers, and I’ll put them on my laptops!

There is, it appears, a fix. Open up a Terminal window and run the Updater as sudo:

sudo /Applications/Utilities/Adobe\ Utilities.localized/Adobe\ Updater5/Adobe\ Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Updater

This appears to be an incredibly brainless permissions problem. Sigh.

Right now, I want a personal agent who can manage my seemingly endless morass of software updates (WordPress 2.9.2 is available! You haven’t yet switched over to an SVN-backed install! You fool! OS X wants to install software updates! Tweetie needs updating!) never mind sift through my spam or be my Facebook birthday reminder.

2) It’s anti-technology: you’re buying a newspaper that tells you not to buy things without having tried them, where its opinions are factually inaccurate.

3) No video: the Telegraph comes on paper, and is hardly even animated, even when you’re throwing it in the trash. Its opinion pieces are animated, but in the wrong way.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on the Telegraph? Oh, you can’t. It doesn’t do that. It doesn’t play MP3s either. There are rumours that Saturday’s Telegraph might play MP3s, but only DRM ones from the Telegraph’s store, so don’t buy Saturday’s Telegraph either.

4.1) No multitasking: Tried reading more than one article at a time, or having more than three pages open? You can’t! You only have two eyes! The Telegraph doesn’t come with more eyes, and also doesn’t come with a handy way for you to keep multiple articles open at the same time on the same page. Although it does display multiple articles on the same page, you can’t choose them – they’re “dictated” to you by the “editor” of the paper. This is the same editor who would decree that you wouldn’t want to see porn in the Telegraph.

5) Its reporters are terrible: this problem isn’t unique to the Telegraph, but look at other newspapers like the Financial Times, or magazines like the Economist. Better researched articles, better quality of commentary, and yet with the Telegraph, with the same delivery mechanism, you get at best equal performance.

6) Reading it is costing you money: the Telegraph costs lots of money to produce, and it only gets printed on special newsprint. All of that, every day, comes out of money that could be channelled away from a self-important minority (e.g. Telegraph readers) and towards more generally useful ideas, like, say, the BBC.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones: sit next to someone reading the Telegraph and you can practically hear everything they’re thinking, from their views on taxation and social equality to education and immigration. It’s another example of the Telegraph charging a premium price – compared to, say The Sun, but delivering an equally buggy product.

8) It’s not very well designed: use the Telegraph as a newspaper and with the intent to be well-informed about the world around you and it’s not going to work. It’s a newspaper that happens to have badly researched opinions written in it masquerading as news. Jack of two trades, but master of neither.

9) It charges for satnav: the Telegraph will always let you know that you’re the centre of your own very special uninformed universe.

10) Those newspapers are holding back better technologies: as every hotel still thinks it should provide newspapers, the momentum behind this technology is only dying. But if it wasn’t for such bad opinion “journalism” masquerading as fact, we’d have a more-informed populace better equipped to deal with today’s rapidly changing world.

A parody of the Telegraph’s 10 reasons not to buy the iPhone 4g. If it’s not clear, I think “list journalism” is journalism of the worst, laziest and most irresponsible kind.

Remember Mark Coleran’s (and others) Movie OS motion graphics? Like it or not, I think they’re the real future, and point towards interface and interaction design for the rest of us. Movie OS is right, and everything else we have is wrong.

Thesis:

Normal people ‘don’t understand’ computers. Of course, the position is more nuanced than that, and you can do everything from point to documents like Apple’s HIG (for both the OS X platform for Mac computers and the iPhone and iPad platforms), Microsoft’s Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines and Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design & Interaction Guide to the trainwreck that was the Read/Write Web Facebook Login Fiasco.

But let me focus on one, small aspect, and see if I can persuade you that there’s a genuine insight into how we design interfaces.

Action and Reaction, Cause and Effect

By an intuitive interface, in some ways what we’re describing is an interface which makes it abundantly clear what the consequences of an action are. Ideally, we’d like those consequences to be communicated in a subtle but understandable manner, and also in a way that requires the minimum amount of high-level cognitive processing in order to get across the meaning of the message.

Some examples:

• one-way destruction of data with no undo
• tagging of an image that will propagate through a social graph, publishing information to an audience of hundreds (thousands?)
• moving, not copying, files

The tools that we have to get across these messages – which, in their own ways, are all incredibly important – are a very limited palette. One that looks like this:

A typical Windows Aero modal warning, from the Microsoft Windows UX Guide

A Windows Aero risky action confirmation, from the Microsoft Windows UX Guide

A Standard Alert on Mac OS X, from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines

A well-written alert message on Mac OS X, from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines

A determinate progress bar on Mac OS X, from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines

An action sheet, modal view and alert on iPhone OS, from the Apple iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

A bar-style progress view in a toolbar on iPhone OS, from Apple's iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

A network activity indicator and a toolbar activity indicator in iPhone OS, from Apple's iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Why do we have these UI palettes? Well, mainly because of Xerox. And they haven’t changed in over 20 years.

So how do we get across this incredibly critical information more clearly?

Luckily, a whole industry has already done it for us, the problem is that we (the geeks, the professional computer users, the internet commenters) have been laughably dismissive of that work, because it wasn’t “realistic”.

But just because something isn’t realistic doesn’t mean it can’t be better. And I think it is. Substantially.

Movie OS: it makes sense

Think of a situation you’ve probably been in recently. You’re in a darkened room with at least a hundred other people. Someone in front of you is using a computer. Something incredibly tense and relevant is happening, or is about to happen. Something that could potentially dramatically, critically change the course of someone’s life.

Hugh Jackman, or Tom Cruise, or Angelina Jolie, or Brad Pitt, or Daniel Craig is  pretending to use a pretend computer. And it’s all made up. In fact, it’s hilarious. It’s not even a real computer! It’s not even Windows! Or a Mac! Or it looks like a normal computer on the outside, but what’s on the screen bears no resemblance to what you see in your office.

Real computers don’t look anything like that! It’s like a Fisher Price interface! What’s all this stuff whizzing about? Why, when Meg Ryan uses AOL to send an email, does it animate a letter-fold, put itself in an envelope and fly off the screen? Why, when Hugh Jackman is messing around with RSA encryption, is he moving 3D objects around a screen? Why is the encrypted email displayed as gibberish, when it would just be a normal email with, say, a PGP icon next to it?

Because if none of those things happened, if it wasn’t shown that way, you’d miss it. Forget the 10 foot interface. This is the 50 foot interface for brain dead people who like explosions. It has to be abundantly clear. You can’t miss it.

And you can’t afford to miss it, because Meg sending Tom an email is important. Angelina destructively erasing hard drives is important. Wayne Knight (Dennis Nedry) in shutting down Jurassic Park’s security systems and displaying a wagging finger is important. Ariana Richards, playing “Lex” “This is UNIX!” Murphy, navigating a 3D filesystem to do device management and open a door, or turn on a security system, is important. Incrdibly important. And you need to know when, or if, these things have happened.

"Access Granted" by Mark Coleran from Mr & Mrs Smith

"Lockdown Alert" by Mark Coleran, from xXx: The State of the Union

"Disc Wipe / Erasure Protocol ZERO" by Mark Coleran from xXx: The State of the Union

OK, so the main problem here is that these are all static screenshots. But.

In Movie OS, visual storytelling is used to make the system’s important, critical reaction to a user’s action abundantly clear. In Movie OS, you know if you’re logging into Facebook.

I’d argue that visual storytelling doesn’t exist – if it does, it hardly exists at all – in computer or consumer eletronics user interfaces. The entire palette of visual storytelling in terms of interface, through accident of history, is purely engineering and control-led.

This is where, I’d say, Apple is grasping when it says that interfaces should sometimes look toward real-life objects. Real-life physical objects have affordances that are used in effective visual storytelling – and animation – that can be used well to make clear the consequences of actions. It’s more complicated than that, though, and it can go horribly wrong as well as right.

I’m a big Pixar fan, and learning more and more every day about animation. Animation, and the kind of animation that Pixar praises, worships and strives for, in terms of conveying weight and emotion and meaning, is what I’d argue our next-generation storytelling interfaces need.

Expert animators know how to visually convey, unambigously, the weight, the heft, the sheer effort (or lack of effort) Mr. Incredible is expending in picking up a car. A car: something that’s heavy. Something that’s heavy like 20GB worth of files, as opposed to something light, like only 20MB worth. But one can see how being instantly shown the heft, the feel, the weight of something in a file operation is helpful and intuitive in a way that text displaying “You are moving 20GB of files” isn’t.

File Copy Progress Indicator from Windows Aero

I give our industry slack. For most of the last twenty years, we haven’t had the luxury of a stupendously powerful graphics processing unit sitting idle while you’re not running around a gorgeously rendered 60 frames per second photorealistic 3D environment. With ample processing cycles spare for physics modelling. Do you see what I’m getting at? We need storytellers and animators to get across the cause from our effect as a user. Frameworks like Core Animation and Windows Presentation Foundation are the first steps to providing ways in which we can use animation and storytelling to enhance the user experience.

I’m not arguging for a virtual 3D interface where you walk into your 3D office and you pick up a piece of paper in a filing cabinet and it flops around in the air convincingly. I’m arguing for taking the visual storytelling talents, the learnings from evolutionary cognitive psychology in terms of the affordances our brains give us in understanding a phsyical environment, and letting them loose on how we use our WIMPy environment, at the very least.

There’s a reason why Apple has a patent on rubberband scrolling. It is not a coincidence that Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple, as well as having been CEO of Pixar.

I caveat all of this with the note that I’ve had no formal training, and many people more qualified than me have probably thought a lot more about this kind of thing. Some of my best friends are, as they say, interaction designers. But at the very least, I’m pleased that I’ve finally worked out why over the last decade or so I’ve been collecting DVDs of movies for no reason other than their vision of what computing interfaces will look like in the future.

So: am I wrong? Does this make sense? Please comment below.

Update: Everything old is new again. A kind comment from Hacker News points out a paper from 15 years ago entitled Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface.

Update: From another kind comment at OSNews, a collection of Movie OSs at TV Tropes, entitled the Viewer Friendly Interface. TV Tropes lists Key Tenets of a Movie OS / Viewer Friendly Interface. One of them might sound familiar.

• All applications must be run full screen – there is no multitasking on television. Windows may show in the background, but they might as well be wallpaper for all anyone uses them.

Remind you of anything?

Update: Edited for spelling and grammar.

• WWDC will see an updated iPhone 3GS (running on the same A4 SoC as the iPad)
• WWDC will see the existing iPhone 3GS processor platform move down to the iPhone 3G
• Apple will maintain two versions of the iPhone, and two only. Until the switch to LTE, they will remain the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, because we shouldn’t care what’s inside them, only that the 3GS (2009 model) is faster than the 3G (2009) model but slower than the 3GS (2010 model). Witness the naming conventions of MacBooks and MacBook Pros, iMacs, iPods and every other Apple product line.
• January/February 2011 will see an iPad S model which will gain a camera (front/back) and a new SoC that might be multicore but will definitely have 512MB of on-package RAM. The existing (2010) iPad model will get even cheaper.
• July 2011 will see the iPhone 3G upgraded to the A4 SoC and the iPhone 3GS will take on the same SoC (A5?) as the iPad S. Consumers won’t be told how fast, or how much RAM, is on the package.
• I expect that Apple’s probably quite annoyed that they even had to sully iPhone’s name by having to add “3G” to it, and that they’re even more distressed about the “S” added on to the Go Faster Stripes version. Maybe they’ll drop back to iPhone and iPhone S.
• Something to remember: Apple products are like cars. Specifically, BMW and Mercedes ones. Yes, I know about the quality and the product differentiation. But also the model numbers. The model numbers don’t ever, ever change, but what’s inside the products do.

I’m slightly less confident about this, but:

• January/February 2011 (concurrent with the iPad S model) will see the relaunch of Apple TV, using the A4 or A5 platform and a derivative of iPhone OS. It will cost the same as the existing Apple TV.

Many thanks for your reply.

I am disappointed to see that Martin voted in favour of the DEB.

My understanding is that the DEB will now likely go through to wash-up
without sufficient debate at committee or otherwise. I am unaware as
to whether you received a reply from Lord Mandelson regarding your
constituents concerns.

A balanced approach to copyright and encouraging digital innovation is
incredibly important to me. I own and run a growing, award-winning and
internationally recognised business, based in Vauxhall – near where I
live – that employs people directly involved in digital content
creation, and I sincerely believe that the approach taking in the DEB
was wrong. In DEB, I see legislation drafted and lobbied for by
traditional content industries who have been unwilling or unable to
produce successful strategies to deal with an audience that actively
wants to engage with its content.

I am sorry to say that you have lost my vote in the upcoming election.

Best regards,

Dan Hon

• NBC is catching a lot of flack for its revenue-preserving strategy of not showing any live/interesting Olympics coverage, preferring to bunch it all in to primetime in an effort to chase the ad dollar.
• This has annoyed lots of people, and will continue to annoy ever increasing numbers of people. The people it’s already annoying, though, are on-demand, my-schedule-not-your-schedule consumers of content, and will be most vocal in their annoyance.
• Unfortunately these people also happen to demonstrably be people who actually want to watch the Olympics.
• We’re in a period of flux, because NBC only has so many hours of broadcast spectrum to fill, but broadcast spectrum is still the easiest way of reaching lots of people. This is not good for anyone, and uncomfortable for everyone.

This was brought home to me by the Bafta coverage in the UK on Sunday:

• The Bafta Film Awards are Bafta’s event. They run them when, and where, they want to.
• But like Wimbledon, there may always be some sort of consideration as to when things happen, especially if there are lucrative (my supposition) broadcast rights involved
• The BBC, like NBC, only has so many hours of broadcast spectrum, though
• You have a public who want to know what the results are, a la the Olympics, and you have a few ways of getting hold of those results:
  • Live, undelayed broadcast
  • As-live, delayed broadcast
  • Live online (video, text, tweet, whatever)
• Best result would be live online updates, plus live, undelayed broadcast. Everyone finds out everything at the same time, and you get the moving picture drama (important, I reckon, for this particular event) of the awards ceremony that you don’t get with text
• Second best? Probably what we had on the night. Online, live – in this case, text – and broadcast for everyone else. I’m happy to include myself in an edge case/minority in that I followed both Bafta’s tweets, as well as wanting to watch the broadcast. I want to know who won, but it was scrumptious to see Cameron’s reaction to Bigelow’s directorial win
• Now, I don’t know if live, undelayed broadcast was an option. It’s the BBC’s schedule, and there are only so many avenues for terrestrial broadcast. Bafta’s options are, for the time being, limited.

This’ll all shake itself out, more or less, in the next few years.

Five Futures I’d Be Happy Relocating To

1. THE FUTURE AS ENVISAGED BY THE 1979 TITLE “THE USBORNE BOOK OF THE FUTURE“
2. THE FUTURE AS ENVISAGED BY 1960S FUTURISTS
3. ANYWHERE WITH FREE BUCKMINSTER FULLER DOMES FOR ALL
4. THE “GOOD” 2015 VERSION OF HILL VALLEY, AS NEVER SEEN ON-SCREEN IN THE BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY
5. THE IMPLIED REBOOT OF POST-CONSUMER HUMAN SOCIETY OF WALL-E

Five Futures I’d Rather Not Relocate To

1. THE FUTURE AS ENVISAGED BY LATE 1990S ENVIRONMENTALISTS
2. THE FUTURE AS ENVISAGED BY A NEANDERTHAL WHO HAS EXPERIENCED A DROUGHT
3. ANYWHERE WITH C-BEAMS GLITTERING
4. THE COST-BENEFIT INTERSTELLAR HAULAGE/STORAGE UTILISATION ANALYSIS DIVISION OF AMERICAN AIRLINES (SPACE FREIGHTERS), PREPARING A REPORT ON THE FEASIBILITY OF CALLING THE VALLEY FORGE BACK INTO COMMERCIAL SERVICE
5. ANY FUTURE AS REGULARLY ENVISAGED BY THE DAILY MAIL

* Inspired by a conversation with Naomi Alderman