Vincent Gable’s Blog

…control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.

–Mencius Molbug

Jeff Raskin calls this principle it monotony, and explains it comprehensively in The Humane Interface.

I’ve always felt a little uneasy about the idea. Computers are supposed to free us from tedium and repetition, by doing things for us. A fluid interface is unnatural yes, but the goal of computing should be to exceed what’s possible in the corporal word, not to copy it imperfectly.

But fundamentally, I think Raskin and Molbug are more right than wrong. Paradoxically, dumb interfaces beat smart interfaces most of the time.

When I was in my early teens, I played a lot of Marathon — the classic Macintosh first-person shooter by Bungie.

There’s a detail about Marathon ∞ that I haven’t seen documented anywhere, but I thought was very cool at the time.

If you tried to use MacsBug on a PowerPC machine to inspect M∞, none of the functions had names, except for one: HeyPervertStopLookingAtMyPEF.

(PEF stands for Preferred Executable Format, the way Mac OS applications stored PowerPC code).

Today, you can still play Marathon 2: Durandal on XBox Live for a price, or play any of the trilogy for free on a computer. Sadly though, I don’t think the game has aged as well as Escape Velocity, which is still a blast today.

/* If you are uncertain of the correct encoding, you should use UTF-8, */
/* which is the encoding designated by RFC 2396 as the correct encoding */
/* for use in URLs.… */

– CFURL.h

This echos my experience, when in doubt, choose UTF8 for the web. UTF8 is backwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII (eg. ‘A’ is 0×41 in ASCII and UTF8).

But know that UTF8 is a variable-length encoding: non-ASCII characters maybe represented by > 1 byte. As a general rule with Unicode, I do not expect a char or wchar_t to always map to a character in a string. Encoding details can be messy, e.g. “É” might be represented as one character, or two composed characters “´E”. It never hurts to brush up on Unicode.

Apparently by 1958, mankind’s subservient relationship with computers was sadly well established,

AT THE Vanguard Computing Center – in Washington, D. C, I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”

A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.

“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”

– THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (Oct, 1958)

I’d never discourage anyone from making the most fun error messages and interactions possible. But when being sneered at by the machine gives operators more of a connection to it than using it normally, I think something is broken. I can’t imagine that fostering a healthy operator-machine relationship. Honestly though, I don’t know that it’s worse than the same boring regular interactions, but with boring error messages instead.

When it comes to building the physical world, we kind of understand our limitations. We build steps. … We understand our limitations. And we build around it. But for some reason when it comes to the mental world, when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stockmarkets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations, even though they don’t stare us in the face in the same way, we could design a better world. And that, I think, is the hope of this thing.

–Dan Ariely, concluding a very entertaining TED talk. The transcript is up, but I liked his delivery so much I watched the video.

Stairs and ladders aren’t an implication that you’re too weak to pull yourself out of a pool. Yet amazingly people sometimes get insulted by simplified interfaces, as if it somehow implies they are so stupid they can’t handle complexity.

I was fortunate enough to hear Jonathan Ive talk about launching the iMac. As he was leaving a store on launch-day, a furious technology reported accosted him in the parking lot, shouting What have you done? He was incensed that the iMac was so cute, approachable, and untechnical — everything that he thought a computer shouldn’t be.

Some of this behavior is explained by simple elitism. If computers are hard to use, than it keeps the idiots out, and proves what a macho man you are if you can use them.

But I suspect refusal to accept our cognitive limitations is also related to our cultural refusal to accept mental illness. Quoting Mark C. Chu-Carroll’s experience with depression,

How many people have heard about my stomach problems? A lot of people. I need to take the drugs three times a day, so people see me popping pills. … Out of the dozens of people who’ve heard about my stomach problem, and know about the drugs I take for it, how many have lectured me about how I shouldn’t take those nasty drugs? Zero. No one has ever even made a comment about how I shouldn’t be taking medications for something that’s just uncomfortable. Even knowing that some of the stuff I take for it is addictive, no one, not one single person has ever told me that I didn’t need my medication. No one would even consider it.

But depression? It’s a very different story.…

Somewhat over 1/2 of the people who hear that I take an antidepressant express disapproval in some way. Around 1/3 make snide comments about “happy pills” and lecture me about how only weak-willed nebbishes who can’t deal with reality need psychiatric medication.

I confess to being thoroughly mystified by this. Why is it OK for my stomach, or my heart, or my pancreas to be ill in a way that needs to be treated with medication, but it’s not OK for my brain? Why are illnesses that originate in this one organ so different from all others, so that so many people believe that nothing can possibly go wrong with it? That there are absolutely no problems with the brain that can possibly be treated by medication?

Why is it OK for me to take expensive, addictive drugs for a painful but non-life-threatening problem with my stomach; but totally unacceptable for me to take cheap harmless drugs for a painful but non-threatening problem with my brain?

If we can accept that our brains are fallible, like everything else, and that this isn’t somehow immoral, we can build a better world.

…I’d rather have the text of Clay’s speech than the video. For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it’s smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it’s searchable. Plus, it works on more devices. (I acknowledge that only the first of these is fundamental; but that alone would be enough).

–Tim Bray

Videos, speech, etc. will always carry more emotional content. But for consuming ideas, text offers the highest bandwidth and most precision. Unfortunately, writing well takes time, and can hinder conversation.

Conceptually, I believe illustrative pictures and infographics are valid elements of modern text, like links, or typography.

…the peak end rule. When thinking about a total experience, people tend to place too much weight on the last part of the experience. In one experiment, people had to hold their hands under cold water for one minute. Then, they had to hold their hands under cold water for one minute again, then keep their hands in the water for an additional 30 seconds while the temperature was gradually raised. When asked about it afterwards, most people preferred the second option to the first, even though the second had more total discomfort. (An intrusive medical device was redesigned along these lines, resulting in a longer period of discomfort but a relatively comfortable final few seconds. People liked it a lot better.)

–Bruce Schneier

I’ve been saying this for a while — as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think.

–Clay Shirky

Switching projects over to iPhone OS 3.0 means discovering that functions I’m using are deprecated. Occasionally there isn’t a totally straightforward replacement, and the best thing to do is to file a bug/TODO/note for myself, and ignore the warning until a later version, when major refactoring will be possible. But bitter experience has taught me to have Xcode treat warnings as errors¹, so it’s necessary to trick the compiler into ignoring the warning for things to build.

-Wno-deprecated

The -Wno-deprecated flag tells GCC to suppress warnings about deprecated code. But adding it to an Xcode project means you won’t get useful warnings about other depreciated code.

You could file a bug telling yourself to turn that warning back on after the deprecated functionality has been updated. That should work just fine. But it feels like bad project hygiene to me.

Casting and Protocols

Type casting is a dangerous old-C technique that’s earned its infamy. But it’s undeniably fitting to use a deprecated language feature to get deprecated code to build. The basic idea is to declare a protocol that includes the method you want to suppress warnings for,

@protocol DeprecatedHack
- (void) myDeprecatedMethod;
@end

then just cast your objects so the compiler thinks they implement the protocol,

[foo myDeprecatedMethod]; //warnings
[(id<DeprecatedHack>>)foo myDeprecatedMethod]; //no warnings

Although having to declare a protocol is somewhat heavyweight, it leaves a nice artifact in the code reminding you to replace deprecated functionality.

Protocols Not Required

Sometimes just casting to id is enough. This happens if another object has a non-deprecated method with the same name.

¹For experimental or prototyping projects I let warnings slide. But in the main project I always treat warnings as errors. Ignoring them in production code has never worked — warnings fester and grow on each other.

I am wrapping up work on Prometheus, an iPhone app that edits the Simple English Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, I am having trouble finding people to take the pre-release version for a spin, and tell me what they think. I want to be sure I’ve fixed any glaring issues before I push my work out to the App Store.

If you are interested in helping, please visit the Prometheus webpage.

Thank you!