Entries tagged “hardware”

A small note about my reference yesterday to Apple's folly in not taking advantage of their tight OS/hardware integration. People forget just how much one can do with well-integrated hardware and software, but if you consider how much we do right now with peripherals that are barely aware of each other's presence, the potential is awesome.

Look at Microsoft's scroll wheel. Say what you want to about their lack of innovation, blah blah blah, but everyone I know who uses one won't go back to a mouse that doesn't have one. Even the most diehard Mac zealots I know all plug in either one of the Microsoft optical mice with scroll wheels or the Logitech clones of them. I started using a five button mouse about a year and a half ago (it's got extra buttons flanking the mouse on either side) and now I can't go back to 3 buttons because I'm too used to using those extra two to navigate forward and back in my browser or through file folders.

And all of this has succeeded despite Windows complete separation of OS and hardware. That separation is necessary, of course, given the incredible variations that are possible when creating systems on the PC platform. But over time, Microsoft has been able to shoehorn support for the scroll wheel and extra buttons on the mouse, and the Windows key and application (menu) key on the keyboard, into Windows itself, first by including driver disks with hardware and then by migrating those functions into the OS in later revisions.

So what opportunity is Apple missing? OS X users are champing at the bit already, eager to point out that X (finally!) has decent right-click support. (Of course the old punchline is that Mac OS has always had a second mouse button, it's just on the keyboard.) The point isn't that you can right-click and cut, copy, or paste. The point is that you can move common UI interactions into much more readily understandable physical manifestations. I've got pretty good muscle memory for anticipating where a dialogue box will pop up, or where a scroll bar's thumb will appear, but if I'm running at an unfamiliar screen resolution or using someone else's computer, all of that memory is worthless. However, I've yet to find a person whose mouse scroll wheel wasn't immediately and consistently useful for me.

People are focused on the wrong functions, of course. Consumer PCs have keyboards festooned with dozens of useless buttons, all covered in inscrutable iconography. Hit the yellow button with the square on it to launch the useless proprietary media player that your vendor preloaded onto your machine. But in a time where both Macs and Windows finally have stable, stays-up-for-weeks operating systems, launching an application hardly deserves a special button on a keyboard. Using them does.

Microsoft's hardware group, as usual, is on the right track. Their Office keyboard, while still plagued with pointless application launching icons, has some truly innovative features. Most prominent on the keyboard is a scroll wheel on the left side. Presuming that you mouse with your right hand, this wheel serves as a counterpart, for when your right hand is occupied with typing. Not that big a deal.

Much more useful is the trio of buttons below it, permanently mapped to cut, copy, and paste. That's useful, and works in every application right away. Granted, most power users are used to ctrl + c or ctrl + v, but for new users or those who relearn easily, it's a liberation. This is especially true because the shift + insert method of pasting data is inconvenient on the keyboard: they've hidden the insert key so effectively as to make it almost unusable. Given that it's never touched by anyone except for me, that's probably a fair trade.

I'd have put the scissors and clipboard icons right on the buttons, since most Windows apps use that convention anyway, but even with plain text labels, they're great. Isn't this the sort of thing Apple's supposed to be good at?

Above the scroll wheel are back and forward buttons. Again, duplicating functionality you can get on a lot of 5-button mice. But if you don't have 5 buttons, or you're more keyboard-oriented, these are powerful, and they'll work in your web browser, file browser, and lots of desktop apps that use the navigation model. Finally, beneath all of these new buttons lies a rocker switch, which lets you flip through applications without having to alt-tab. Powerful, useful, intuitive.

There's a ton of other functions, of course, like the great Undo and Redo keys, and the duplication of useful punctuation like the equals sign and parentheses above the number pad. But my point isn't to revel in a cool keyboard, it's to ask where the hell Apple's innovation is in this area.

Apple owns the APIs for their OS. They punish non-compliant apps heavily. As reward for being good, applications should get features for "free" when they comply with API standards. Microsoft does this well. Applications get the XP Fisher Price look for free if they're written to the API correctly. They get automatic handling of scroll wheels and application switching keys and all the other frilly horseshit on contemporary desktop hardware. But the overwhelming majority of Apple users are using the exact same keyboard and there's still no benefit accruing to them for doing so.

Aside from the fact that they keyboards on Macs have been getting progressively worse, there's a tremendous opportunity being ignored. I'll ignore the obvious complaints about Mac mice, as nobody I know who's running OS X even uses the Apple mouse. But if I write my application to the Cocoa APIs, why shouldn't the keyboard have a touch-sensitive strip at the top that displays toolbar icons from the program? Back when the program menu in OS 9 listed running programs, why wouldn't there be an LCD showing the currently running program, next to a wheel that would let me switch between my open apps?

There's far more potential than that, of course. The dock could easily be represented with a touch-sensitive panel that could be detached from the keyboard and clipped alongside a pretty LCD. In an OS that used to be, and is slowly returning to being, focused on direct manipulation, it doesn't get more intuitive than touching an icon to activate it.

There's far more that I'm missing, of course. We're not used to thinking of hardware reacting to a change in status in software, except in limited (and largely useless) minor cases like force-feedback joysticks. There's room for tactile feedback, of course, but I'd be much more interested in having a dedicated wheel mapped to scrolling up and down in a window, or to flipping through the choices in a drop-down menu, become a standard part of keyboards. In having a button that brought the focus of my cursor to the Google search box on the toolbar in my browser, launching a browser instance if necessary.

Even something as simple as minimizing, maximizing, or closing a window has no single-key equivalent. It's been almost twenty years since these things went mainstream, people! The target area for the button I click on to restore a window's size, even having been enlarged by default in Windows XP, is still just a tiny square of pixels in the corner of the screen. It's an even smaller circle in Aqua on OS X. I can, of course, expand the area of that focus by double-clicking on a title bar in Windows, but most people don't know that bit of trivia, and couldn't figure it out.

We've been teaching keyboard shortcuts to users for decades because we're too lazy to teach shortcuts to people who make keyboards.

Microsoft's been promoting its Tablet PCs for about a year now. Despite all the claims, they're more evolutionary than revolutionary, of course. But that's the not the surprising thing about them. The surprising thing about Tablet PCs is that they're going to succeed.

First, the basics: They're laptop computers, most of them. Just like you're already used to using. Due to a combination of cowardice and conservativism, every single design I've seen for a commercial Tablet PC is using the "convertible" design where the standard notebook design can be inverted (perverted?) by swiveling the screen 180 degrees and folding it back over the keyboard, covering it up and yielding a standalone screen that's then viewed in portrait orientation instead of landscape. Ideally, they'd have super-light keyboardless versions of these, true digital slates to write on. But for now we'll probably have to settle for transformable units in relatively standard configurations.

And they run pretty much standard desktop software. They use a version of Windows XP, with some bits and pieces tacked on to handle handwriting. The only distinct app that ships with them that you can't get on an XP laptop right now is a program called Journal, which emulates a standard legal pad, complete with thin rules dividing up lines on the page.

Why, then, will these tablets succeed, despite commanding a several hundred dollar premium over standard laptops? Because they address the fundamental flaws in the user experience of current computers. Although it's somewhat mitigated by the recent ubiquity of laptops, today's computers reveal all too blatantly their history as personal computers. Desktop PCs require you to turn and face away from anyone you're having a conversation with, and orient yourself to the screen you're working on. Tangles of cables and cords wire your input devices to that screen which is monopolizing your eye contact. And while laptops at least let you nominally face a person you're having a conversation with, they just won't play nice in any work setting, where they just become smaller, less comfortable desktops.

The human factors are very telling. Think back to the highest-level meetings you've had in your career. Whatever major decision-maker or principal who was the Big Presence in the meeting almost certainly didn't have a laptop with him in the conference room. If anything, he (yes, sadly, it was probably a he) had a standard legal pad and a big fat fancy pen. Maybe the legal pad was in a leather binder. The poor pasty lackey to his side, or maybe at the end of the table, had the laptop with the supporting data and relevant background information. The only, rare, exceptions to these arrangments are in extremely technical disciplines.

This dynamic has been established for a number of reasons. That the old suit probably didn't know how to work a computer was undoubtedly high on the list. And he certainly wanted to impress upon those present that he was such an authority that he could command a tech lackey to handle "that computer stuff", of course. But the key thing was body language. A legal pad doesn't interfere in a meeting. It doesn't prevent a glower or glare or raised eyebrow the way that these human reactions are hidden when a person is turned to face a monitor or when shielded behind even the most svelte PowerBook screen.

Resting against the edge of a conference table, balanced on the knee of a crossed leg, tossed towards the middle of the table for emphasis, or slowly pushed across the table in a conciliatory gesture of resignation, that legal pad is a prop. It's a symbol so powerful as to have become cliché.

And the Tablet PC is the first computer to recognize this essential bit of business playacting. Microsoft has for years been making hardware that recognizes human factors in a way that the Macintosh has, frustratingly, been amazingly unaware of. Mapping page navigation to a scroll wheel makes infinitely more sense than having a user target a tiny scroll button. Most bits of GUI widgetry probably ought to be represented in hardware, as well, if only to mitigate the Fitts of apoplexy induced by the high cost that current user interfaces exact for even the simplest of errors. Pressure-sensitive touch input is a pretty good step towards a more forgiving interaction between users and machines.

The rest is all fine, of course. It runs Office and Internet Explorer and all the crap you're already doing. But Tablet PCs do a much more capable job of recognizing the Wi-Fi enabled, pervasively connected future. There's an implicit assumption that these machines, or their descendents, will be used in social situations, in contexts where the only peers and networking that matter have to do with the humans that surround you.

Another liberation of pervasive computing is from the tyranny of the pen and pad. Jotting down notes is still the simplest, quickest method of shaping an idea in its crudest stages, or of documenting a conversation as it happens. And some people still tend to shape at least certain categories of thought on plain old pen and paper, even if they are otherwise extremely wired and technical users. Like, for example, me. Though these paper notes can't be quickly searched, easily categorized and stored, or neatly edited, they succeed because they are not overburdened by interface and allow instantaneous sharing of the information they contain.

Apple's made nods towards this reality, of course. The cheerful guy at the Apple Store who demoed the iMac for us made sure to pivot the screen (with the requisite extended fingertip) to show how you could "share your work with your friends". But I sit on the sofa next to my friends, or at a table with my co-workers. We face each other, not our common object of admiration. Granted, if I watched more TV, that might be a more frequent arrangement. But didn't we go around shouting from the caboose of the ClueTrain that The Web Isn't TV?

In short, Tablet PCs, or their eventual heirs in the hardware realm, will succeed because they accommodate the human factors of collaboration better than any previous iteration of computer hardware. They won't replace desktop PCs or laptops, of course, because sometimes people do need to work on their own, focused on the task at hand. But now we'll also have the option of using a computer in social settings like a Starbucks or a conference room or during a lecture in a classroom without having to compromise our participation in the event.

Coming up: Why weblogs are the killer app for Tablet PCs, and why Microsoft can't, but should, admit that fact.