Aaargh! I hate this stupid thing! Why won’t it do what I ask it to do!
I heard this cry coming from the living room one evening. My fiancée, Emily, was trying to use my beloved iPad to write an e-mail. “What’s it done this time?”, I politely inquire in response.
“Everything!” came the reply, “All I want to do is send an e-mail, how hard can it be!”
Always wanting to help (like the loving husband-to-be I am) I show her how to copy and paste, move the cursor and find the comma key on e-mail layout keyboards, but then it struck me, why is this so hard? So, I asked her to sit down with me and tell me all of the problems that a real person(tm) has with Apple’s latest gadget.
“Firstly, before I met you, I hadn’t ever used a Mac. I had heard they were just for designers and arty-farty people, but they’re just normal computers for every-day use. This is not about not understanding Macs, this is about the iPad. Also, I love the long battery life, and I really like the screen, it’s brilliant.”
“I’m a Hotmail user, and I can’t get more than 50 messages when I’m using the Mail app. Your GMail account works fine, searches on the server and everything, but Hotmail is a second-class citizen and doesn’t get all the features it should. It also doesn’t sync read/unread items back to the web interface (which I use most of the time) so I don’t know what I’ve read and what I haven’t.”
“There’s no iPad app for Facebook. The iPhone version on the iPad looks rubbish, as do all iPhone-specific apps. The visual quality is really poor and not what I’ve come to expect from the iPad.”
“I’m left-handed, and sometimes the iPad doesn’t pick up the gestures that I make. Tapping on an icon sometimes sends me to the search screen! The whole interface seems to have been made for right-handed people.”
“Moving the cursor around when entering text is painfully slow and really inaccurate. When I’m moving it the magnifying glass is right under my finger so that doesn’t help at all! When my wrist touches the screen the whole screen moves and suddenly jumps to the bottom which is infuriating.”
“It’s heavy. For a girl, it’d be nice to have it in a handbag, but the iPad is too large and heavy for that. It wouldn’t fit in 80% of my handbags and any it would fit in would also take a 13″ laptop, which would be far more useful.”
“I’ve not played many games on any platform so I can’t compare the iPad to anything else like that. Still, the games I play on it are fun, if a little pointless.”
“Getting stuff on to it is hard. iTunes is an issue and if you don’t use Google/MobileMe, something like Dropbox or have your work e-mail on it, it’s even harder to put stuff on it. It needs a USB port to load documents on. The camera connection kit is good, but it’s pretty slow.”
“There’s no Flash support for it, and to me that’s critical. For example, checking the weather on the BBC, I can get the basic information but the radar weather map doesn’t work. Sites that have their own video player, like Wedding TV1 don’t work, and for me, that seriously hampers its usefulness”
“I want web sites to work the same on the iPad as they do on the PC. These ‘Mobile-optimised’ sites are suitable for the iPhone, but not for the iPad and they shouldn’t come up (N.B. this is referring to the Hotmail mobile web interface). I don’t want to have to learn another interface. If I wanted just e-mail, I’ll use the Mail app, but since I want the web site in the browser, show me the actual web site!”
“It’s just not an improvement on a laptop for the situations where I’d use it. If I wanted something that size I’d take a laptop instead as it’s has a DVD drive, all my music and all my web sites.”
“All that said, it’s a brilliant device that has its purposes and has generally replaced the laptop for general Internet browsing, but for what I want something that kind of size to do, it just doesn’t do it.”
1Yes boys, it exists, it’s on Sky.
These aren’t the typical usability problems that his lordship Neilsen came up with, they represent problems of someone who uses Macs, works with a computer every day, and still has issues getting things done on the iPad. To be honest, some days I do too (discovering that yet another web site uses Flash is a classic).
What gets me is that many of these can be resolved by Apple and their close partners: making Hotmail work better with Mail, doing more testing with left-handed users, Facebook releasing an iPad app, Hotmail turning off the mobile site for the iPad, making the iPad render pixel-doubled iPhone apps properly (I refuse to believe that text can’t be made smooth), and finally making iTunes work better for file management (or enabling people to use explorer/finder).
The moral of the story is whilst you can’t please everyone with your designs, don’t think solely about your target audience. Try to think about the people around them who will use the device and make sure it works for them too. If you’re after a more practical use for this story, learn that the iPad isn’t perfect, in fact, it’s far from it. I still believe it’s the best that’s out there, and I’d love Emily to get her hands on a Galaxy Tablet to compare the two. We’ll have to wait to see what 2011 and Android 3.0 and the BlackBerry Playbook can bring to the table to gauge if the iPad has a real competitor which can make my fiancée happy!
This month at London Web Standards, two in-depth HTML5 talks, covering bits which aren’t in common usage at the moment, and what you can do with the bits that are. This is part two, Opera’s Patrick Lauke (@patrick_h_lauke) on <video> and <audio>. Part one has Google’s Michael Mahemoff (@mahemoff) on 8 HTML5 features you haven’t seen before. Below are my notes and write-up. Enjoy!
Sketchnotes from HTML5 Video and Audio
First off, Patrick had a cold, hence the poorly drawn tissue in the top-left corner.
<video> and <audio> are some of the most important elements in HTML5. Steve Jobs thought so much of these new elements and HTML5′s potential, that Flash was dropped from iOS devices and everyone was encouraged to make the transition. Even Microsoft has recognised their importance, adding native support for the elements in IE9.
The basic idea behind <video> and <audio> was to do for these media types what had been done for images. Instead of using messy <object> and <embed> tags to make Flash work properly, create something simple that doesn’t rely on proprietary technology. Therefore, <video> is now a native object in the browser, which allows you to treat it just like any other object, including styling it with CSS and even using CSS transforms on the video.
There’s an important aside around video formats which I’ll cover briefly here. There are three codecs:
MP4/H.264 – implemented by Chrome, Safari and IE9, encumbered with potential royalty payments, whatever the MPEG association try to say.
Ogg Theora – implemented by Chrome, Firefox and Opera, open source but not very good as a codec
WebM – implemented by Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE9 (with downloaded codec) it’s made for the web and will be the de-facto standard going forward. Apple have yet to commit to using the format
Thankfully, you can use multiple sources in your videos which will fall back to one another. You can even fall back all the way to Flash to give older browsers a fighting chance.
Each browser gets to implement their own controls for the video player, but these can be overridden and the whole video controlled by JavaScript. There are events which fire at different times and theoretically it’s possible to time-match subtitle tracks, which WhatWG are looking into for future versions of the HTML spec.
<audio> is very similar in implementation to <video>, with the same format fight, this time between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Interestingly you can remove the controls from the page and run the whole thing from JavaScript, allowing for such horrible interactions as a whoosh sound when hovering over a button.
Best yet, is that Patrick officially certified these techniques ready for use. Their is sufficient support and fallback options to support all browsers, take YouTube for example, running HTML5 video for nearly a year now. However, he asks that you use feature detection rather than browser sniffing when making these fallbacks. There are a few tools out at the moment which do all this for you, such as SublimeVideo and videoJS.
This month at London Web Standards, two in-depth HTML5 talks, covering bits which aren’t in common usage at the moment, and what you can do with the bits that are. This is part one, Google’s Michael Mahemoff (@mahemoff) on 8 HTML5 features you haven’t seen before, and part two, Opera’s Patrick Lauke (@patrick_h_lauke) on <video> and <audio>. Below are my notes and write-up. Enjoy!
Sketchnotes for 8 HTML5 Features You Haven't Seen Before
This talk focused on 8 less-commonly used features of HTML5. Whether they’re all actually part of HTML5 is up for debate, but they’re all specifications being worked on for implementation in browsers, so that’s enough.
Firstly, Michael had made his slides using HTML5, which worked really quite well, nice flashy transitions and all that and was a good example of some of the features he showed off (notably the history API) .
1. App Caching
App caching is making web sites work offline: it tells browsers which files they should keep cached and re-load when the URL is requested. Whole apps can be cached like this and the iPhone and Android make good use of this. This is not the same as…
2. Client-side Storage
Which is data storage accessed from JavaScript. You used to do this with cookies, but now you’ve got access to simple storage arrays, and WebSQL and IndexedDBs are coming. Both of these together replace services like Google Gears which was a stop-gap for this.
3. Cross Origin Resource Sharing
One big problem with AJAX is that the XHR request can’t request something on another domain. The work-around for this is JSONP which is a hack if there ever was one. CORS allows people to do this in an open way… which to me, is simply dangerous. However, it will have some uses, unlike…
4. Ping
Which, apart from being a new social network, adds a bit of header information basically pinging a web site when a link is clicked. It’s designed to replace redirects but I didn’t really understand a good use case for it. If anyone wants to explain it, please drop me a line.
5. Web Sockets
Web sockets allow for a connection to a server to be kept alive and events received, much like sockets created in any other programming language. Web sites like Facebook (for chat) and Swoopo currently use Comet for doing this and web sockets will allow them to get updates pushed to the page from the server without the ugly hacks.
6. History API
I’m looking forward to this one: it allows for JavaScript inspection and manipulation of the browser’s history stack (or array, whatever it is) without changing the URL to use the # technique. It’s going to be very powerful for making applications where you don’t change the page but lots of things change state and users use the back button a lot. I made a note that it’s quite a bit like a view state, making an ASP.NET comparison, but that’s a bit unfair.
7. Workers
Web workers enables multi-threading in JavaScript. Finally! I hear you cry. It’s not widely supported at the moment and it is about 25% slower than running the process in the main thread, but means you can do all sorts of things whilst the UI keeps updating.
8. Geo-location
Used to be done by IP with big expensive databases, but can now be done with hooks into device hardware. Useful for a load of different applications, this will be one of the most widely-used of the HTML5 APIs.
And that’s it. They’re all under-the-hood improvements, and the browser makers are making it easier to do the cool stuff, which will bring in a lot of innovative web apps as people discover the power of these new tools.
As a developer and iPhone fan, nothing pleases me more to say that Android has caught up with the iPhone. Android hardware has been great for a while, the Motorola Droid and Nexus One being the first in a wave of great devices, but the software hadn’t been right. Android took its sweet time to develop but finally has all the great features iPhone users have enjoyed since the iPhone 3G and more (wi-fi hotspots for example).
Thing is, the iPhone, and iOS, has moved on.
Since the launch of the iPad, every Android-lover has been waiting for a tablet with Android on it. They want the brilliance and openness of Android on a more useful (day-to-day) form factor. To those people, I say wait, it’s not ready yet. In order to put iOS on a tablet, Apple had to fork the code base into two versions, iPhone 3.1 (later 4.0) and iPad 3.2. To date (though that may change at the September 1st event), these two branches have not converged, nearly 9 months later. Apple did this for a very good reason: the native controllers and views are not suitable for tablet devices and new paradigms needed to be created.
The SplitView Navigation controller, necessary for much of the good UI interaction on the iPad. Courtesy of Apple
So, why isn’t this a good idea. For one, the Android developer API says it doesn’t support screens larger than 4.3″. That should be a pretty good first clue. Take the iPad HCI guidelines for a second clue. It states that full screen transitions are bad, interfaces have to be tailored to the device, and you have to do more than just blow up the interface to twice the size. Take a look at how iPhone apps look on the iPad for that one.
iPhone app on an iPad, now think of an Android app, just blown up.
Truthfully, the current Android SDK just can’t cope with the demands of a tablet UI. Little things like smooth transitions when rotating to big things like having universal apps which cover multiple screen sizes well. Android has support for multiple screen sizes, but it relies on relative positioning for this and is an inelegant solution compared with Apple’s interface builder.
A bigger screen will accentuate the differences in the quality of iOS and Android apps. If you have a mediocre Android app and put it on a tablet, it’s going to look poor, but put a mediocre iPhone app on the iPad, and it’s at least usable. Take a look at this video of a $50 Android tablet from India Do you want a UI like that on your tablet? Didn’t think so.
So, my advice, is wait. Wait until Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) comes out in Q4 this year, then wait until 2011 for some good hardware. 3.0 has set precedent by disallowing vendor customisation, forcing a much-more Apple-esque standard set of controllers which will suit more purposes. Acer and Motorola have already announced that they’re delaying the launch of their Android tablets until 3.0 is available.
Still, when that time comes around, the second generation iPad will be out, and then Android will be playing catch up again.
Update: Just seen the ViewSonic ViewPad 7, a 7″ Froyo tablet. Take a look at the video in the link: it’s full-screen all the way, sluggish and, I quote “a plastic rebadge me-too Android tablet”. When you’re watching the video, think about how that’s going to work on a tablet the size of an iPad (or the Archos 101 for that matter). It’s not going to be pretty.
