The Ribbon is introduced in the Help file thus:

And if you’ve used previous versions of Word, you’ll wonder where the menus and toolbars have gone. That’s the beauty of the Ribbon. No longer do you have to wander through the maze of menus, submenus, and toolbars searching for what you want.

No, instead we now have to wander through a bewildering array of Ribbon tabs and drop-down menus. It’s as if the Office 2007 design team didn’t realize that everyone who’s been using Word for more than a year or two already knows their way around Word’s menu structure. It’s as if someone re-arranged my local neighborhood so that I “no longer have to wander through” the streets I already know. Indeed, SecretGeek finds the Ribbon so hard to find things in, he suggests that the Ribbon should include its own search feature so people can find features that are hidden among all those tabs!

It’s not just Microsoft. Check out Qwiki, “the information experience”. It is very clearly optimized to look cool in a demo. A demo, of course, is the ultimate in “aimed at new users” — it’s aimed at people who aren’t even users yet, but might become users. And user interface guru Bruce Tognazzini has been decrying the OS X Dock for years, partly on the basis that “It makes for a great demo, but not a great product.”

Interestingly, while I was prepping this post for publication, I became aware of Paul Miller’s article, “The Condescending UI”. It excoriates many of the very same problems in Apple’s and Microsoft’s recent OSes, saying that “these new tricks are horrible and offensive. They’re not only condescending and overwrought, they’re actually counter-functional.”

It’s as if usability tests and design reviews are all conducted with people who have never used the software in question before… and those who already have some domain knowledge are left out in the cold, forced to discard their knowledge every few years.

Are we really always newbies at everything? Or do developers even believe that we are? Or, heck, do marketers and product managers actually believe that we’re all still newbies? Or that there’s some vast, untapped market of prospective new users out there, just waiting for an even more dumbed-down interface before they’ll buy their first computer?

Just in case anyone out there believes any of those things, please, let me be the one to disabuse you of the notion. Anyone who doesn’t already use a computer is not ever going to. The only exception here is people under about 10 years old, and they’re not scared of unfamiliar UIs — to them, every UI is new, and they’re eager to learn new things. Stop dumbing things down, and stop sacrificing your long-time users’ skills in the name of changing things just for the hell of it.

1. Obviously, it wastes the user’s time and may even annoy them.
2. It also contributes to the general problem of “too damned many dialog boxes in computing”. This is subtly but importantly different from the previous point: It trains the user to unthinkingly click the default option in any dialog box, just to keep it from wasting their time.
3. Finally, it may actually hinder the user’s ability to leave your program. Look at this page by Joel Spolsky, and search for “exit Juno”. A user thought the “Are you sure you want to exit?” dialog meant that the computer was advising her that there were ill effects from doing so.

Okay, that last one seems like sort of an edge case, right? But even the first two items are enough reason to pay attention to when you should — and shouldn’t — ask the user to confirm something.

My proposal: Only ask a user for confirmation when the action was initiated by a single click or keystroke, and it has some kind of bad effects. Yes, this means that any time you ask someone to confirm whether they want to exit your program, and they have already saved all their work, you just wasted their time. This one’s particularly prevalent in the gaming world, I’ve noticed: Even if you’re in between games, and your scores are all saved — meaning the worst possible consequence of exiting the game is that you’ll have to start the application again — most games will show you a “Do you really want to exit Game Name?” dialog anyway.

MS Word gets this exactly right. If your document hasn’t been changed since the last time you saved it, then exiting the program has no ill effects. If you click the little X, or press Alt+F4, MS Word won’t even bother to ask you “Are you sure?”; it’ll just exit with no muss and no fuss. It’s only if you have some unsaved work that you’ll see the “Do you want to save your changes?” dialog. And if your document already has a filename, Word doesn’t bother to prompt you for a new one; you only get the “Save As…” dialog if the document doesn’t yet have a filename.

The program only bothers the user if it has to; if it can figure things out on its own, it does. Just the way it should be.

If you’re writing another application — I don’t care whether it’s whether it’s a web application, Rich Internet Application, desktop application, or smartphone application — please take a hint from the way MS Word handles confirmation questions. Don’t make your app be the software equivalent of “that guy”.

1. When someone says it to you, you know how to spell it. This means that if my friend wants to tell me about your site at a party or a club or out on the street somewhere, she doesn’t have to spell it out for me. She can just say your site’s name, and I immediately know how to type it into my browser.
2. When you see it written, you immediately know how to pronounce it. This is the other side of the coin, and it matters when I read about your site in print and then want to tell a friend about it. In fact, if your site’s name is sufficiently opaque, I could read about it, visit it, sign up, and use your service for months… and still not know how to tell a friend about it without having to say awkward things like, “Ummm… Zip-tick? something like that? I don’t really know how to pronounce it, I just know it’s spelled X-Y-P-T-I-Q.”

Marc Hedlund writes about Why Wesabe Lost to Mint, and manages to miss part of this point:

Mint was a better name and had a better design – both of these things are true, but I don’t believe they were primary causes for our company to fail and for Mint to be acquired. Mint’s CEO likes to talk about how ridiculous our name was relative to theirs, but I think the examples of Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google, and plenty of others make it plain that even ludicrous names (as all of those were thought to be when the companies launched) can go on to be great brands. (emphasis in original)

He cites “Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google” as examples of “ludicrous” names, but he misses the fact that all of them meet both of the requirements above — and Wesabe doesn’t. I’m assuming it’s pronounced “wee-SOB-ay”, but it could just as easily be read as “wee-SAYB” (rhymes with “babe”) — and I’m guessing it’s a mash-up between wasabi and “we sabe“, where sabe is the Spanish word for “to know”, and the basis for the English verb “to savvy”.

But that’s just a guess.

Of course, you already know how to spell it, but imagine someone told you about “a new site called /wee-SOB-ay/”… how would you guess it might be spelled? Ideas that come to my mind are: wiisabe, weesabay, weesobbe (possibly with accent on the E in the site’s logo); and “Just tell me how it’s spelled, already!”

Note that Google got its name from the mathematical concept of a googol: 10¹⁰⁰, a very large number. But they deliberately changed the spelling, so people would be more able to tell each other about it, and more able to correctly type in what they’d heard.

And so, in the fullness of time, most people learned to never, ever use the <blink> tag. And that was good, for a while. But more recently, people have started putting new — and even worse — moving doo-dads on their sites: Animated Twitter feeds.

I’m talking about the kind of feeds that refresh or scroll every five seconds (or sometimes more frequently). You can see them all across the web. Here are just a few examples:

• Any comments page on Whedonesque (Joss Whedon’s site). Try to read the text, and your gaze gets pulled over to the constantly-updating “Twitteresque” box on the right.
• Any article on WikiHow. You have to scroll down one screen before the “Recent Changes” box becomes visible on the right — but that just means the problem isn’t apparent to a cursory, design-level glance; it only becomes obvious when you try to actually use the site for its intended purpose, by reading the content that’s published on it.
• Even Webmonkey has gotten in on the action. Again, you need to scroll down a screen (unless your browser is way taller than mine), but the “Recent Articles” box will try to grab your attention as soon as you read past the screenshot in the main article text.
• Like Webmonkey, you’d think TechCrunch would know better than to do this. Admittedly, they do put their “PostUp Beta World’s Best Tweeters” box further down the page, but their articles are longer, too.

Why would someone put something on their web page that effectively says, “Hey, don’t waste your time reading my content! Go look at my Twitter feed instead! Or even at some total stranger’s Twitter feed!” I’m honestly mystified. (That’s why my own Twitter-feed widget, Hummingbird, does not and never will have any kind of auto-scroll feature.)

But what mystifies me even more is: Why would people who (I presume) would sneer in disgust at the very idea of putting a <blink> tag on one of their pages — even for just one or two words — then turn around and put a much larger, more annoying motion distraction on every page in their site?

The fact that it uses AJAX and a Web 2.0, RESTful API doesn’t make a paragraph-sized chunk of never-ending motion any less of a design and usability nightmare. And this is not exactly a new concept: the W3C advised against constant motion back in 1999.

At that, they were Johnny-come-latelies compared to Jakob Nielsen, who called out “constantly running animations” as far back as 1996. In other words: The days of Netscape Navigator version 2.0x called. They have some usability advice for you… that you apparently still haven’t learned yet.

It can’t be that hard to figure out… can it?

Getting used to it has occupied a fair bit of my time, but here are a few early impressions. Obviously, some of these are impressions of the Android OS, and others are about the phone’s hardware.

• The Android calendar will let me set alarms anywhere from 1-99 units in advance of events, where the units can be minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. This actually beats what the old PalmOS used to let me do (and the webOS replaced by a simple drop-down of 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day — not very useful; sometimes I want 3 hours’ warning).
• The Epic is a much bigger, chunkier device than the Prē was. It still fits in my pants pocket, but not so smoothly. Not only is it just plain larger than the Prē, it also has less-rounded corners. Also, the protective case I got for the Epic is the rubberized kind, noticeably thicker than the “invisible skin” I had on my Prē.
• What’s with the battery gauge not giving an actual percent? That seems so… naff. I’ve found a nice app to give me usable information: Modded Logic’s Battery Status Bar.
• Live Wallpaper is cool as anything. It also seems to eat batteries like a very hungry thing. I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it or not.
• Also, the battery seems to take a looooong time to charge. I could plug in a Prē with a nearly-empty battery and have it back up near full in only a couple of hours. The Epic seems to gain only about 20% or so of battery charge in a similar period of time. Yikes!
• Swype works impressively well. Even using the phone one-handed (and hence Swyping with my thumb as I cradle the phone in my fingers), I can frequently get it to understand me well enough (after only a day and a half!) that I rarely slide out the physical keyboard.
• On the other hand, having that physical keyboard available is still really nice, not least because it has cursor-arrow keys, allowing easy editing of text in a way that was tooth-grindingly frustrating at best (and sometimes simply impossible) on the Palm Prē.
• Another big win: visible scroll bars while you’re scrolling a list (then they fade out). The lack of any indication of where you were in a list (especially a long one) was one of my strongest complaints against webOS when it first came out, and Palm hasn’t addressed it in the various updates over the past more-than-a-year. Google’s gotten this right: The scroll bar doesn’t take up any screen space except when you’re using it, and at that point, it gives you both size and position feedback, like a good scroll bar should.
• And, for yet another win that I wasn’t expecting: Haptic feedback! It turns out to be really useful, not just a bell and/or whistle. (Honestly, I’ll have to put some thought into just what’s so cool about it — and what’s so useful; they’re not quite the same things! That can become another article for another time.)
• The standard Android Memo application astounds me. I didn’t think it was possible to design one that was worse than webOS’ “sticky-note inspired” design, but this actually manages it. In its favor, it has 5 colors instead of 4. To its detriment, it can’t display more than 4 of them on the screen at once (as compared to webOS’ 12), and it won’t let you sort the memos by anything other than last edit time. This is a total loss for user experience: Not only does the sorting look completely random until you figure out what’s going on, but it keeps changing, meaning the user can never learn where in the list a given memo’s going to be.

Obviously, there are other memo- and note-pad apps in the Android marketplace. I have faith that quite a few of them will prove better and more useful than the one that came with the OS.

Also, the screen is big and bright and clear. That huge screen is part of the reason for both the device’s size and the battery-life problems, but it sure does look pretty.

All in all, I think I like it. I’ve certainly found more to like than to dislike in the past couple of days, which puts it noticeably ahead of the Palm Prē and webOS, which caused me such grief and anguish last summer (and last autumn, and this spring).

If only it were smaller and had twice the battery capacity… (Yes, I know I’m asking for something completely unreasonable. After all, I’d like that smaller phone to still have the same size screen. Who cares if it’s geometrically impossible?)

I’d never realized there was so much variation just in one letter. I was converted into a fontaholic on the spot (though not so completely as my sister, who now designs typefaces professionally for a prestigious font foundry — way to go, sis!). But it’s easy to get too absorbed in the letters.

Like Debussy, who noted that “music is the space between the notes”, I’ve become enamored with the kind of typography that happens between the letters. It’s more important than you think it is, because: It makes your text easier for people to read.

Non-Breaking Spaces

The humble non-breaking space has been a full-fledged HTML entity code since the late ’90s. Entering   will produce one in any browser that’s still in use… and yet, nobody makes use of them. It’s a shame that this character’s being wasted; it’s very useful in places like:

Before dashes

I’ve got a couple of em dashes in my very first paragraph. Go ahead and try changing your browser window’s width so the text re-flows. No matter what you do, you can’t get those dashes to show up at the beginning of a line. Ah, but this dash — this one, you can get at the beginning of a line. Looks ugly, doesn’t it?

If you look at a properly typeset book, magazine, or newspaper, you’ll see that dashes work nicely at the ends of lines, but if they wind up at the beginnings of lines, they look awkward. Almost orphaned. Putting a non-breaking space before your dashes will ensure that the awkward layout never happens. (I’ve got a pair of keystrokes in my editor bound to the sequences “ — ” and “ – ” — note that each of those sequences includes a trailing space, to save me even more typing. And in laying out those particular quoted strings, I used non-breaking spaces at the ends, so that the closing quotes are always on the same line as the rest of the sequence.)

At paragraph endings, to avoid orphans

I mentioned things looking “almost orphaned” earlier. In typesetting, the word “orphan” can refer to either of two things: One is “A single line of text at the top of a (physical) page” — this is the meaning commonly used by word processing programs, which will apply “widow and orphan protection” to ensure that no fewer than two lines ever appear together at the top or bottom of a page.

But the other meaning is “one or two short words of text forming a sole, final line of a paragraph”. For example, consider:

This is the sort of thing up with which I will not
put.

Once again, this looks horrible. And once again, it can be avoided by using a non-breaking space between the penultimate and final words of your sentences. (Okay, this takes a bit of mindfulness, I’ll admit. Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that works best when you’re editing, not when you’re writing the first time around. And you only need it with short final words; there’s no need to bother if the last word of your paragraph is “elephantine”.)

At beginnings and ends of inline titles

The history of literature and the arts is filled with titles that start or end with very short words. Titles like As You Like It, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and Of Mice and Men; titles that run the gamut from A River Runs Through It to The Wizard of Oz; from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; from The Godfather, Part II to The King and I.

Depending on just how wide your browser window is, and what your font size is, probably at least one of those titles has a lone, orphaned word at the beginning or the end of a line. But you can resize your browser window however you like, and the titles in this paragraph will never have that orphaned-word effect. I’m sure you can guess exactly why. And the titles are: As You Like It, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and Of Mice and Men; titles that run the gamut from A River Runs Through It to The Wizard of Oz; from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; from The Godfather, Part II to The King and I.

If Only We Had Non-Breaking Hyphens!

All this talk about non-breaking spaces is pretty cool, but what do you do when you list a phone number, and you want to avoid having (415) 555‑1212 get broken across a line-break? Or a book’s ISBN, such as 020530902‑X or 030010699‑8?

For some reason, the W3C never bothered to provide a decent non-breaking hyphen code, like &nbhy; or &nbh; or some such. More’s the pity. But the Unicode code point U+2011 (or 8209 in decimal), found in the “General Punctuation” section, is defined as a non-breaking hyphen. (It occupies the next code point after U+2010, simply called “hyphen”.) So using either ‑ or ‑ should get you a nice non-breaking hyphen in any modern browser.

If that doesn’t do it for you, you could set up a .nowrap { white-space: nowrap; } definition in your sitewide CSS file. Then just wrap any hyphenated text that you want to keep on one line in span tags with the class “nowrap”, like so: <span class="nowrap">123‑456‑7890</span>

You probably won’t be surprised to find examples of these basic principles in the source code to many of my previous posts. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time.

I think Facebook has now hit its “cap”. People who don’t yet have Facebook accounts now seem to be saying, “I ain’t gettin’ one now!” Others who do have accounts are finally abandoning them. And I’m one of those abandoners.

I have a little bit of interest in the Disapora* Project, but I don’t think it will really take off. On the other hand, in a recent New York Times article about the project, both its staffers and backers have some things to say about just how quickly they managed to raise funding — and all of those things point to a very clear demand for an alternative to Facebook.

Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lately been saying that privacy is no longer a social norm, but lots of people don’t accept this. In fact, many of us think that Zuckerberg is saying such things in the hope of making them come true, rather than as observations of something that’s already come to pass.

When I joined Facebook, back around 2005 or 2006, it defaulted to private. For everything. The site was a walled garden, and without creating an account, you could hardly see anything besides its front page and its Terms of Service. People who put their information into the site back then had certain expectations of what would be done with it — expectations that have first been chipped away at, and now completely violated. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick does a very nice job of deconstructing Zuckerberg’s disingenuous stance on privacy, well worth reading.

Finally, I’ve said in numerous face-to-face conversations that one of the things I dislike about Facebook is the way it tries to blur or even abolish the distinction between users’ personal and professional lives. For a long time, I assumed that was an unintended consequence of the site’s architecture. At worst, I thought Facebook’s management was callously indifferent to the problem. But yesterday, I found out that Zuckerberg actually believes that keeping such a distinction is wrong. Michael Zimmer quotes from David Kirkpatrick’s upcoming book, The Facebook Effect, then supplies some of his own (beautifully scathing!) analysis. Zuckerberg says: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Zuckerberg says those days are “probably” coming to an end, but I think what he really means is they are “hopefully” coming to an end — that is, he hopes that they are.

I very strongly hope that they’re not. And I have good reason to hope: Not only are people deleting their Facebook accounts in droves, but this may just be the beginning of the departure. A recent Wired News story about a study showing that the privacy backlash was being driven by the over-35 crowd, and 18-to-34-year-olds essentially didn’t care, attracted a fair number of comments from users claiming to be under 30 and very concerned about Facebook’s privacy stance — many to the point of having already deleted their accounts.

And there’s a brewing investigation by the Federal Trade Commission that might also signal that society’s views on privacy haven’t changed as much as Zuckerberg claims.

For an example of how to make easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, fine-grained privacy controls, consider Livejournal (and sites that have re-used its open-source codebase, like Dreamwidth). A user can set their “default” privacy level for their posts to be public, friends-only, or private. Then they can easily override that default setting on a post-by-post basis, and create special lists or filters that contain only some of their friends-list. This makes it easy to post an entry that can only be seen by, for example, friends who are geographically nearby, or friends with an interest in a particular hobby (“only some of my friends are sports fans; the others don’t want to hear me talk about football”), or friends that one really trusts, or whatever. The UIs for these things are easy to find and understand, and any user who cares about privacy or visibility can pretty easily determine what the privacy setting on any one of their posts is.

It’s a trade-off, and I’m probably missing some aspects of it. What I’m wondering about, simply, is whether the trade is a net gain or a net loss.

Another way to put this — in harshly evolutionary terms, in fact — is: If someone with augmented reality and someone without it were competing for some life-or-death resource, who would win?

Of course, I’m not the first person to wonder this. In 1992, Neal Stephenson wrote about Hiro Protagonist going into battle with a high-tech combat suit and a bad-ass heads-up display:

He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time… a screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?

Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.

The [enemy who's shooting at him] has … whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). [...]

He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

As prophetic as Snow Crash was, though, Stephenson was nowhere near the first to tackle the topic of high- versus low-tech in combat situations. Way back in 1959, Robert Heinlein wrote, in Starship Troopers:

If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone ax — will sneak up on him and bash his head in while he’s trying to read a vernier.

Of course, Heinlein isn’t arguing against giving soldiers high-tech gadgets; this is in the context of the introduction of powered armor as a major sci-fi trope. The important part of the quote above isn’t “a lot of gadgets”; it’s ones “that he has to watch”.

Which is a good way of saying that maybe it was more of a user-interface problem. (And, of course, Stephenson was probably familiar with the Heinlein book, and may have even been deliberately tipping his hat to it.)

Smartphone users today don’t usually have to face life-or-death situations (unless you count crossing the street in a busy city). But it’s worth considering whether we could make our user interfaces any easier to use.

When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on.

(Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone needs to be charged every night. No problem there.) But given that, when I press the “on” switch, I should see the screen light up within, say, one second. It should not take ten seconds. By the time ten seconds go by, I’ll assume that I must not have pressed the power switch hard enough, and I’ll try pressing it a second time.

Did you know that the Palm Prē stores power-switch presses in its input buffer? That means that when the phone finally does get around to waking up, it processes the first impulse, lights up the screen… and then immediately blanks it again as it processes the second impulse. This is extremely frustrating.

When the screen lights up and shows me an “unlock” icon, it should actually let me unlock the unit.

I’m not complaining about the fact that it shows me that icon. I recognize that it’s there to conserve my battery life by making me prove that I’m a human being, and not an inanimate object that jostled the phone in a crowded purse or backpack. I’m fine with that.

What I’m not fine with is having to try three-to-five times to get the icon to recognize my input. And it’s not like the Prē stores this stimulus in its input buffer, so if I just wait for it to catch up… it blanks out the screen and I have to try again.

When a call comes in, I should be able to answer it.

I’ve lost track of how many incoming calls I’ve missed because I couldn’t get the phone to turn on in time to catch the call before it went to voice-mail. The screen was showing me the name and photo of the friend who was calling me — sometimes a friend who I’d explicitly asked to call me, and whose call I was anticipating — and yet I couldn’t actually pick up the phone and say hello to them.

This is what we in the user interface biz call a total, ignominious failure.

(Most of the time, the failure is because the damned “unlock” icon wasn’t taking input yet, so this is really just a special case of the problem above — but it happens in such a different context, and it has such different consequences, that it counts as a separate item.)

When I type on the keyboard, the characters should show up within 5 seconds of the keypresses.

This has the benefit of allowing me to realize that the keypresses have triggered, as well as letting me see what the hell I’ve already succeeded in inputting. It lets me see if I need to go back and fix a typo. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling that the phone might actually respond to my input, instead of just sitting there imitating a sleek, shiny, black, sexy rock.

Waiting a full ten seconds (as has happened to me on occasion) is even worse. I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that 5 seconds is the worst delay I’ve ever seen on the Prē; it’s just the limit of what I’ll accept as “basic minimum functionality” (and I think even that is being incredibly generous).

At least once per day, the Palm Prē fails me on at least one of these completely basic requirements. When it works, it’s kind of nice, and even manages to be useful some of the time. But there are just too many occasions when it flat-out fails to function. I’m sick and tired of being out on the town with friends and having someone say, “Can we look up such-and-so on Yelp?” and then struggling with my phone for five minutes before giving up and saying, “No. I can’t look that up for you”. At which point some kind soul with a working smartphone takes pity on me and finishes the job in about a minute.

This is also not meant to be an exhaustive list of the Palm Prē’s failings, or those of webOS. There are all sorts of UI and UX decisions I could rail against, but I don’t want this blog to become a full-time anti-Prē and anti-webOS blog. I have wider interests than that. This post is just meant to be a list of the basic, core usability failures that have driven me to distraction.

For some people, the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard is a deal-breaker. For me, the smaller-than-standard keyboard on the average netbook is a powerful disincentive: If I had to use one, it would slow down my interaction with the netbook — and if I learned to be fluent and productive with the small keyboard, it might mess up my muscle memory for dealing with full-size keyboards on my “real” computers. It’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

The Palm Prē’s physical keyboard is tiny. I can only key it with my thumbs, and there’s no risk of interference with my pre-existing keyboarding skills. Inputting data with it is achingly slow, but offset by the device’s wonderful portability (it fits into a pocket even easier than an iPhone does). But I can’t really edit text with it, because there’s no D-pad to do precise cursor positioning with. Even the Orange+finger-movement trick is balky and awkward, in my experience; if I want to correct a single-letter typo, getting the cursor after the incorrect character so I can backspace and correct it is such an ordeal, it’s often quicker and easier for me to use Shift+Backspace to delete the entire word and then retype the whole thing.

In effect, even though the phone has the ability to edit text, the interface makes it so difficult that I can’t use the capability. It might as well not be there. What would a better interface mechanism look like?

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, the protagonist starts off with a set of glasses that provide him with a constant Net connection and heads-up displays of whatever he desires: maps, email, people’s vCards, and so on. But Stross (perhaps wisely) doesn’t give much detail about the glasses’ input mechanism. “He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.” How? That part’s left to the reader’s imagination. (A very crafty trick on Stross’ part, and one that writers can pull off and user-interface engineers cannot.)

If I want to do with my phone what Stross’ character did, I have to yank it out of my pocket, press the power switch, then make a swiping gesture that tells the phone its attention has been requested by a real human (rather than simply being jostled in a pocket or handbag). But Stross’ protagonist’s glasses were already powered up and in use, so suppose I were already using my phone and decided I wanted to take a picture of something?

Tap a physical button to escape from whatever app I was already using, then press an on-screen button for the main “launcher” feature. Find the “camera” icon, tap it, wait for the camera to load. Then I can aim and press another on-screen button to capture the image.

Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could write an app for it. And I actually can update my blog from my phone; it has a WebKit-based browser and enough screen real estate to make writing and posting an entry possible, albeit painful.

Stross’ interface has the luxury of not having to be real, of course. But something that already works as a real-life prototype is the Sixth Sense system, built by Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab. It senses the user’s hands, and you can take a picture simply by framing whatever-it-is you want to capture with your fingers and thumbs. (It does a whole lot of other things, too, and I highly recommend the entire video.)