Failure « Vincent Gable’s Blog

January 15, 2010

EULA Today Fail

Filed under: Announcement,iPhone | App Store, EULA, Failure, Legal, License, USA TODAY, Web
― Vincent Gable on January 15, 2010

The EULA¹ for the USA TODAY iPhone App starts off

General

These Terms of Service govern your use of the USATODAY.com website (the “Site”) only and do not govern your use of other USA TODAY services, such as services offered by the USA TODAY print newspaper.

Clearly this invalidates the agreement on the iPhone, since the iPhone App is not “the USATODAY.com website”.

This is mildly embarrassing for USA TODAY, and even more of a fumble for Mercury Intermedia, who built the app. But I can’t think of any way this actually hurts anyone, even in theory. Users are already bound by the App Store Terms and Conditions, so why bother putting your own EULA (that nobody’s ever going to read much less care about) in your app?

¹To see the EULA, tap that little i near the bottom left of the homescreen, then tap Terms of Service. The text above was copied from version 1.5 of the USA TODAY iPhone App.

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October 22, 2009

iPhone Shows the Irrelevance of the Programmer User

Filed under: iPhone,Usability | App Store, Apple, Business, Failure, Freedom
― Vincent Gable on October 22, 2009

There’s a lot of discord over Apple’s draconian “closed” handling of the iPhone and App store. And rightly so. But there are a few interesting lessons in the current situation. The one I want to discuss now is that,

Being able to program your own computer isn’t enough to make it open

As things stand today, Apple can’t stop you from installing any damn iPhone app if you build yourself.

To do that you have to join the iPhone developer program of course. And there’s a $99/year fee. That’s inconvenient, but it’s just using a subscription-based way of selling iPhone OS: Developer Edition.

That’s the kind of dirty money-grabbing scheme I’d expect from Microsoft. It’s a bit shady, because it’s not how most OSes are sold. But it’s not without precedent. And unless you are against ever charging money for software, I don’t think there’s an argument that it’s actually depriving people of freedom.

Yes, it’s an unaffordably high price for many. But the iPhone is a premium good that costs real money to build — it’s inherently beyond many people’s means, even when subsidized.

Observation: Only Binaries Matter

If you have a great iPhone app that Apple won’t allow into the store, you can still give it to me in source code form, and since I have iPhone OS: Developer Edition, I can run it on my iPhone.

But clearly that’s not good enough.

In fact, I’m not aware of any substantive iPhone App that’s distributed as source. By “substantive” I mean an app with a lot of users — say as many as the 100th most downloaded App Store app — or an app that does something that makes people jealous, like tethering (See update!), which we know is possible using the SDK. I realize this is a wishy-washy definition — what I’m trying to say is that distributed-as-source iPhone Apps seem to be totally irrelevant.

“It’s not open until I can put Linux on it”

I believe it’s technically possible to run Linux on an iPhone without jail-breaking it. (Although it’s not terribly practical.) Just build Linux (or an emulator that runs Linux) as an iPhone app, and leave it running all the time to get around the limitations on background processes.

Apple won’t allow such a thing into the App Store of course —but how does that stop you from distributing the source for it? As best I can tell, it doesn’t.

So as things stand today, yes you can distribute source code that lets any iPhone OS: Developer Edition user run Linux. It’s technically challenging, but it’s doable.

Conclusion

It’s possible to build open systems on top of closed systems. We’ve done it before when we built the internet on Ma Bell’s back.

But the iPhone remains a closed device. User-compiled applications have 0 momentum. And I think that clearly shows the irrelevance of the rare “programmer user”, who is comfortable dealing with the source code for the programs he uses.

UPDATE 2010-01-21: iProxy is an open-source project to enable tethering! Maybe the programmer-user will have their day after-all.

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October 14, 2009

February 10, 2009

Good engineering is necessary, but good design has a more direct impact on helping people do amazing things with computers

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes,Usability | Bad Design, Failure, Software Development
― Vincent Gable on February 10, 2009

…the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart’s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn’t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system’s powerful, language-size command structure? It’s an interesting argument when you think about it that way, but it ultimately doomed his design to obscurity, while his proteges who left for Xerox PARC and designed a system people could learn to use in a hour went on to change the world. Frictionless user experience is paramount, engineering concerns are secondary.

—Buzz Andersen, summarizing John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, a history of the early personal computer industry

The title this post is something I’ve been saying as part of my personal statement on hirevincent.com for years.

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February 9, 2009

No Ducking Way!

Filed under: Design,Quotes,Uncategorized | Diction, Failure, iPhone, Microsoft, Profanity, Spell Checkers
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

I’ve finally found an example of, someone intentionally typing “ducking” on their iPhone,

Plotting routes to meetings based on who I’m currently ducking. It’s good for exercise. Also that time iPhone was correct- I meant ducking.

Obviously we can’t have a spellchecker suggesting profanity. But is it really so wrong to just leave it alone? Can we trust that if someone says something that strongly they really meant it?

Word 2008 seems to try, bless it’s heart. It won’t suggest or correct, “Mike Lee” (at least when it’s written as two words).

But it still can’t stand one of the heavy seven (original MP3). Word gives it the scarlet underline. That strikes me as odd. I wish I knew the story behind it. Is it actually a dangerously common typo? Is it statistically more taboo? Did someone just make a Puritan judgement call, and decide people wanted to be corrected for writing it? (UPDATE 2009-11-18: apparently it is the worst swear word in the World, at least according to that cute story.)

Ask yourself, are obscenity filters a Bad Idea, or an Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

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Now Recognizing President Barrack Abeam

Filed under: Design,Programming,Usability | Barack Obama, Failure, Firefox, Futurism, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Spell Checkers
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

President “Barack Obama” is not recognized by my Mac’s spellchecker. Firefox, Microsoft Word¹, Mac OS X — each of them has a built in spellchecker, and none of them know how to say our president’s name. Spell checker dictionaries need to be updated more frequently — to keep up with the emails we write.

Things have improved since 1995, but there’s still a long way to go.

There’s more to say about how to fix things, but someone has already said it. The future looks bright,

(Microsoft) now scans through trillions of words, including anonymized text from Hotmail messages, in the hunt for dictionary candidates. On top of this, they monitor words that people manually instruct Word to recognize. “It’s becoming rarer and rarer that anything that comes to us ad hoc isn’t already on our list” from Hotmail or user data, Calcagno says. According to a July 14, 2006, bug report, for example, the Natural Language Group harvested the following words that had appeared more than 10 times in Hotmail user dictionaries: Netflix, Radiohead, Lipitor, glucosamine, waitressing, taekwondo, and all-nighter.

I think the next step in spellchecking is to follow Mac OS X’s lead, and adopt a system-wide spellchecker. When there’s only one instance of a spellchecker running (not a separate one for every program that might work with text) we can make it much smarter, without requiring a supercomputer.

¹

Microsoft added Barack and Obama to Office’s dictionary back in April 2007, but unfortunately, that change hasn’t yet made it to the ~~Mac Ghetto~~, ahem, “Mac BU”. Or at least I haven’t seen it in Word yet.

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February 5, 2009

I Solemnly Swear to Make Mistakes

Filed under: Accessibility,Design,Programming,Usability | Failure, Software Development
― Vincent Gable on February 5, 2009

President Barack Obama, and two other presidents, have retaken their oaths of office, because of some mistake with their inauguration. That means a little over one in fifteen presidential oaths were botched. If that sounds high, it is. But only because people make mistakes.

That’s why, we must make our software so that people can recover after making a mistake.

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September 30, 2008

July 3, 2008

Learning From Other People’s Failures: Acrobat Reader 9

Filed under: MacOSX,Usability | Adobie, Failure, Installers
― Vincent Gable on July 3, 2008

Epic Fail.

The PC version is awful too.

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June 28, 2008

Auto Dial

Filed under: Research,Usability | Failure, Phones
― Vincent Gable on June 28, 2008

Today, most people I see making phone calls use cellphones. As near as I can tell, every time they call someone they know, they do it using their phone’s address book, instead of keying in their a ten-digit “telephone number”. It’s pretty obvious why. Nobody wants to have to memorize ten-digit numbers. And we think of people by their name, not some number.

This was not something that was hard to predict. Rolodexes have been in every office for decades, because people want to look up people by name, not number. Only recently has software supplanted them.

I was very surprised when I found this unknown invention from the late 1930’s

A NEW desk telephone directory not only finds the number you want but actually dials it for you. All you have to do is slide the knob on the face of the device, called an Auto Dial, to the name you want, then press the small lever at the foot of the machine. When the lever returns to its normal position, in five or six seconds, your call is made and you pick up the phone.

The Auto Dial was invented by a German before (World War II). The only sample in (America) is owned by Alfred Altman, President of the National Dairymen Association. The machine can handle any 50 telephone numbers desired by the user, and changes can be made at will.

The signals can be made up of any number of letters and digits, according to the system used in the local exchange. The regular hand dial on the telephone can be used in the ordinary way when the automatic device has been attached.

What an improvement over memorizing and/or dialing a number! We all have these devices built into our cellphones today. Frighteningly, the original appears easier to use then my cellphone’s “Address Book”.

So why didn’t this invention catch on half a century ago, not just a decade ago? I don’t know. I can only speculate, and I don’t think there is value in writing uninformed guesses down. But understanding why the Auto Dial was never popular is probably very instructive.

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