So. The iPad. Cool, eh?
What, you don’t like it? Think Jobs under-delivered in his keynote? Thinking your tiny Dell netbook can do all that and more, even if you have to crouch to look at the screen and glue your hands together to type?
Yeah, I know. Tablets with full 9.7 inches of ultra-sensitive touch screens are so common nowadays. I mean, these things can even play HD video without crashing their way to reboot, yeah, that’s common too. And the interface? Pssssh, I’ve seen Excel worksheets looking better than that iCal view. And all that starting from $499? Gee, what were these guys thinking.
Seriously, people, get a grip. I don’t know what kind of mystic arcana you believed Jobs would unveil in his keynote, but really, are you that close-minded to think that the iPad is common and overrated? Have you seen many tablet PCs nowadays that look and function as cool and intuitively as the iPad looked in that intro video?
And don’t get me started about the lack of Flash support; seriously, who cares1. Oh I know – Flash developers care. Look, my fellow developers, I admire your skills but seriously, seriously, don’t you ever think that maybe it’s the time to expand your skills a bit if you want to hop on the bandwagon?
Most developer complaints I’ve heard are based on the loose axis of “yeah I know I could do that and more with Cocoa, but I’m confident with my current set of skills and I don’t want to learn Objective-C”. This is wrong and you know it – this is as if PHP developers absolutely refused to dabble on Ruby & Python because they’re “happy with their current set of skills”. We’re called developers for God’s sake, don’t you think we should develop our skills every now and then?
The iPad is not made for you and me, fellow geek. It’s primarily targeted to people that are still afraid of interacting with PCs, those that don’t have a clue about drivers and web apps and Wi-Fi setup. And this is exactly the kind of people that won’t buy a Linux netbook, dear Open Source zealots – because as much as Ubuntu has made Linux user-friendly, there’s still much filling that shows between the seams.
One could argue that I’m a total iPad fangirl and everything above is the fruit of my utter fangirlism, but I assure you, I’m not that much of a fanatic cookie. I’ll probably don’t even buy the first generation iPad. But I’ve seen people getting it so wrong on the interwebs these days that I’ve collected a massive amount of ranting fume.
1 Yeah, I know Farmville fanatics, you’ll have to stick to your netbooks to sow your corn, but I don’t really care about you to be frank.
After 3 years of heavy twittering (with a brief pause of some months – seriously, what was I thinking), I have familiarized myself with most of the service aspects, developing some kind of unwritten Twitter laws.
People don’t take well my Twitter presence at times, so I’ve decided to make a post about it and share: am I a bad Twitter-er people? Do you do these things too?
Without further ado, my patented unwritten Twitter laws™:
- If you follow me and I don’t follow back and you’re absolutely pissed (there are some people who still do that), try to reply at some of my tweets in a coherent, non-jackass way. Fat chances are, I’ll eventually follow you.
- An e-mail containing your follow data arrives in my inbox. I always check your twitter page and do a bit of mini-stalking (apart from obvious spambots). If your twitter stream is full of titles + links, you fail. If it’s full of replies to other people, you fail. If you don’t have an online presence, anywhere, you fail. If you have a link to your facebook account or (God forbid) to your twitter account (endless loop anyone?), you fail. If your twitter stream is protected (seriously?), you fail again. If, however, you express coherent thoughts, no matter the language, no matter the subject, you’ll be likely followed back. It helps if you’re kinda hot too, in a steamy geek kinda way.
- You’re absolutely appalled by my Twitter activity and you decide to unfollow me. If your life or work isn’t spectacular enough to keep my interest in you, don’t expect me to stay a follower of you for long. It’s not a matter of revenge: when I follow someone, it’s because a) I admire their work or lifestyle b) I’d like to know them better (that’s more suitable for Greek twitters). If you decide to unfollow me, you don’t want me to know you better, so if I don’t really admire the things you do, poof! I’m gone too.
- Contrary to some predictions, you can make money off Twitter (or social media, as the cool kids call it). Not directly, I’m not DELL. But most of the freelance jobs I’ve been offered were based on Twitter interaction. I consider this a huge success for my Twitter presence and I don’t really care I have yet to reach 1000 followers.
- I’m all for conversations for Twitter, but please. Not lengthy ones. Don’t expect to draw conclusions from Twitter, it’s not for solving complex geopolitical problems – it can give the hints to transfer the conversation to some other medium though (thanks @stazybohorn).
- I’m perfectly fine with you posting links to your latest blog posts on your Twitter stream. Some people are complaining about this, but I’m not. Since I rarely (if ever) fire up my feed reader, it’s a nice way to let me know of your new posts. I’ll definitely check those out.
- What’s highly annoying: littering a perfectly coherent tweet with inline hashtags. #this is not #cool, #people.
- What’s highly annoying #2: auto-tweeting apps. Think gowalla, foursquare and the like. For the record, I’ve used a command-line hack to filter my Tweetie stream of that jargon. You can find it here. (thanks @olrandir)
- Yes, I’m greek, but I tweet in english. I also blog in english. In fact, about 80% of my online presence is in english. Why? Because english is a simpler, more techno-friendly language that reaches to billions of people, and not just some thousands. I’ll always reply in english, except when what I want to say has only meaning to greek followers (that will probably be a reply to someone though). Case study: this joke tweet reply.
- Fact: even if I respect your work, if you’re a cold elitist bastard at Twitter, you’ll always be a cold elitist bastard to me.
- Personal reminder: you can’t DM people that don’t follow you. You can’t DM people that don’t follow you. You can’t DM people that don’t follow you.
Hm, I think that’s all for now. Feel free to add your own pet peeves, usage patterns and unwritten laws.
God I love Twitter.
Flickr credit: directfromcannes
Tabs (earlier) and overlays (later) are two of the most widely used web interface patterns. By using them, one can organize a complex user interface in seconds, guiding the user to see what he’s meant to see and not get confused by other modules of the application.
When combined though, an interesting little beast emerges: the tabbed overlay.
A service that uses this kind of overlays is Google Docs. I use Google Docs often, mainly to collaborate with greek bloggers on interviews that consist a part of my monthly columns at PC Magazine.
The tabbed overlay is used when you try to invite other people to your document. You try it with me: head to Google Docs and click on Share > Invite people. You add an e-mail address or two in the invite textarea, you add a message, you click send and invitations go their merry way. You can also change permissions by clicking on the Advanced permissions tab and making the necessary changes.
But what if you want to invite people and change permissions, all in one step?
Unfortunately, Google Docs does not support that. You can either do one or another, since when you click on the Advanced permissions tab, the submit button changes from Send to Save & close. This led to an interesting error by my part, the other day.
I’ve filled in some e-mail addresses and then clicked on Advanced permissions. I then clicked on Save & close, thinking that the invitations will be sent anyway, since I’ve filled in the relevant details in the previous tab. Alas! Save & close just saved my permission settings and never sent my invitations.
Needless to say, I was kinda confused when I was informed that my invitation hasn’t been received. After tinkering a bit with the interface, I got it: I was wrong. The form does not “remember” my data from another tab and submits it all together. I must first invite people, then change the permissions. However, strictly from a user point of view, it would make sense if I could just enter my data in all tabs, hit one submit button and be done with, no?
This is one of the cases that the use of this UI module is not optimal. It’s not a major faux pas on Google’s part, but the fact that it even got me, a web designer who’s dabbling into UI design daily, is quite interesting. What about users that do not know about the form submission mechanics?
Maybe a different kind of UI magic should be in place there – for example, I’d move the two checkboxes from the Advanced permissions tab under a More options header on the Invite people tab, which would be hidden by default and visible on demand. Something like this: (expanded view)
I think it makes more sense that way – and we could skip the underwater usability reef that’s lurking there.
