Peter Krantz » Apple

Usability test of the iPhone yields interesting result

Pete — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:15:08 +0000

The swedish usability consulting firm inUse did a usability review of four mobile phones including Apple’s iPhone, the HTC TyTN, Sony Ericsson W910i, and Nokia N95. Users performed common tasks such as making a call by dialing a number manually and then by calling a person from the address book, change volume during a call add a new contact to the address book, create a new calendar event and more.

The result should be useful for those who are trying to convince their IT department:

Stunning. The iPhone has introduced a new interaction paradigm to the world, in an uncompromising way that proves that “less is more” when it comes to true user experience.

Some other interesting quotes from the report include:

Most of the subjects did not mention the HTC at all when speaking of which device they would prefer. [...] Only one of the users was able to carry out all tasks [on the HTC] without the assistance of the test leader and all five users had severe difficulties with at least three of the tasks.

What is it then that makes the iPhone different? Most importantly, it has removed one level of abstraction by allowing the user to act on objects using the finger directly on the phone’s surface. The difference between this and having to press keys on a keyboard and watch the screen to see what happens is striking.

The full report is available in PDF from the inUseful blog.

iChat AV is broken

Pete — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:17:40 +0000

You disable firewalls, forward ports in the router and put your laptop in the DMZ but iChat AV still fails to make a simple video call. My son does video chat with grandma over Skype and it “just works”. What the hell were Apple thinking with iChat AV? Do they really expect people to follow instructions like these to get a simple video call going?

Seems like I’m not alone.

Keeping software up-to-date in OS X

Pete — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:39:03 +0000

I often install apps to try if they work the way I like. Some stay, some I delete almost immediately. Some of them have built in functionality that alerts you when there is an update available. I find that very annoying. If you have many apps these little reminders tend to pop up all the time.

So, I was looking for something to keep tiny apps up to date and found AppFresh. AppFresh will scan your programs folder when you want it to and alert you of any updates it can find. Downloading and installation is automated for most apps as well.

It will also tell you when you lasted used an application – nice if you want to clean you programs folder from unneccessary apps.

You can download AppFresh here.

OS X package management

Pete — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 09:35:19 +0000

Mark Pilgrim writes about the benefits of the easy-to-use package manager in Ubuntu and then feels sorry for his Mac OS-using friends:

“But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. “

I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier. At work the other day I was about to begin installing TWiki by following the rather lengthy installation guidelines. As I was on a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 I fired off a apt-get install twiki and lo and behold, two minutes later the whole thing was there including mysql and a large part of the CPAN library.

On OS X I have been using MacPorts from the terminal. It provides similar features to apt-get but you don’t get update notifications without diving into the terminal. And I rarely dive into the terminal to manually check for updates.

So, I googled around for a decent GUI and found Porticus. Porticus provides a nice GUI, checks for package updates and with a few clicks you can have your environment up to date. It even integrates nicely with Growl. The big difference is of course that packages aren’t pre-compiled (does that disqualify the use of “packages” to describe them?). MacPorts will download the source and build it on your machine. This is strange as Mac platforms are well known and vary little. Why not save everyone the build step and just push the universal binaries?

Fixing OS X Leopard menu bar transparency

Pete — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:12:18 +0000

Update: As many readers now noticed, as of 10.5.2 there is now a preferences setting for the menubar transparency.

For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…).

Someone created a software hack to remove the transparency. There is also a system setting (thank you Johan) to trick the window manager into thinking it is in older hardware. I am not sure of the side effects so I’m not that keen on installing that. Here is the pragmatic fix: take your background image and paint a white stripe, 21 pixels high, at the top. Problem solved. My menu bar is now easy to read with black text on white background (see picture above).

Before painting the white stripe you may have to resize the picture to the exact size of your desktop, otherwise the OS will resize it and it won’t fit the size of the menu bar.

Update: As Peter points out in the comments below, if you use black instead of white the menu will look similar to the default ash grey style of other Leopard apps.

The iPhone cult and self criticism among followers…

Pete — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:37:56 +0000

So the iPhone is out and the Apple cult followers are going crazy all over the place. Unpacking porn and disassemblies are being posted.

When the iPhone was announced I had my doubts about the touch screen keyboard. I had been using a HTC phone for a while and did not really see how they would be able to make a decent touch keyboard. Especially not for us in the norhern hemisphere that use gloves during winter. TUAW is reviewing the touch keyboard and concurs that there is “nothing wrong with the keyboard”. The error seems to be the “meat mittens” of the user. How is that for self criticism? The user is to blame instead of the phone…