is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button

Today, MacRumors reports Apple building HDR into iOS 4.1:

High Dynamic Range photos are photos created using 3 separate photos captured in quick succession at varying exposure levels. The photos are then combined using some complex algorithms to create an enhanced composite photo.

Good question to ponder: why did it have to be Apple to have come up with this, and not Nikon or Canon or anyone else with imaging as its lifeblood?

Sure enough, when I got my iPad last week this quickly emerged as a pain point.

Apple decided in its noble quest for simplicity that the file system should be kept invisible.  Simple, right?  Just don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

It’s a great idea until you actually need to transfer files.  Then it amounts to a really bad idea.

What happens is that each file transfer and remote document viewing app (Air Sharing, GoodReader, DropBox, iBooks, Stanza, etc.) has no choice but to reinvent its own UI for transferring and managing files.  The resulting user experience is massively inconsistent.

And, all of these buckets of files are siloed.  No app can see see another’s contents.  The user is left having to remember what PDF is accessible from which app.

The iOS (was iPhone OS) needs to expose the file system to people who need it.  There should be a clear, obvious way of transferring files among the devices.

Here is the demo I’d like to see some day:  The iPad or iPod “desktops” show up as an extension of the PC’s desktop.   The user drags a file or folder from the PC to the iPad’s “desktop”.  Yes, the mouse cursor extends off your screen and onto the iPad* (*there’s already an app for this).  Boom… file transferred and accessible to all apps.

For bonus points: let the user indicate that changes to the files or folders should be kept in sync across all media.

Within a few moments of playing with the iPad’s photo browser, two things became apparent: 1. there is a better way to crop, and 2. multi-touch, despite the hype, really does have some advantages over the mouse.

The iPad’s photo browser lets you grab an image with two fingers to both pan it and resize it with a single fluid motion.  On the iPad you are merely zooming into a picture to check out your friend’s pores.  But it’s clearly a faster and more fun way to crop images.

I haven’t yet seen cropping done this way, so it constitutes today’s idea to steal.

[Researchers: It would be interesting to validate this claim by comparing the time to crop between using the mouse vs. multi-touch method.]

This scenario also exemplifies a sweet advantage of multi-touch over mouse, which is that it lets you do multiple direct manipulation operations at once.  Cropping is one fluid operation, as opposed to many micro-interactions to do the same task with a mouse:  targeting edges and corners of the crop rectangle with a mouse and dragging them.

That said, you can potentially accomplish a similar fluid crop operation with today’s mouse.

1. User selects the crop tool.  A crop rectangle appears at the largest possible size.
2. User presses turns the mouse wheel to enlarge the photo within the frame.
3. User drags the image around within the frame

This method eliminates the picky targeting of edges and corners in regular cropping.

On Macs the nubs are on the F and J keys.  On PCs they are typically on the D and K keys.  Either way, they help the touch-typist to get their fingers in the right place without having to divert attention from what they are looking at on screen.

The strange thing is, these are the only keys with nubs.  This helps with the heavily used keys.  Our muscle memory helps our fingers find other letters around this center.  But it’s difficult to accurately stretch those digits up to the digit row.  It’s error prone and slows typing as one must carefully check typed numbers for accuracy.  And typing numbers with accuracy is critical.  It could mean the difference between a $6000 and a $7000 request.  And unlike typing words, numerals cannot be assisted by automated spell checkers.

I’ve long wished for nubs up there on the number row to help me out.

Exactly which keys deserve nubs is a good university research project.  The 5-6-7 keys I find difficult to get right without care.   The 9 and 0 I find difficult also.  So offhand I would guess that the 1, 6 and 0 would be good candidates.

By the way, did you notice the little in-joke on the onscreen keyboard on the iPad?  Yes, you guessed it – the images for the F and J rows have little nubs on them. It’s surprising this one got through given Apple’s extreme discipline for minimalism.  Har har.  Yes, Apple, you’ve reduced us 60 wpm typists to hunting and pecking amateurs, and here’s the salt thrown in the wound in the form of nubs that can be seen but not felt.  Good one.

Someone at Apple has a sense of irony.

you can see from the graph what a huge effect changing the name and icon had on downloads. [..] For this app, we saw 20x difference in download rate for the best app listing vs the worst. Wow.

Click here for the scoop.

The ingredients are all in place.  And yet I still haven’t seen a strong play to command our smartphones by voice.  It should be easy pickin’s at this point, nay?

By now, we’re all used to Googling things, which means typing something approximate into Google and having it read your mind and come back with what you meant, without you having to say it properly.

Spotlight, on the other hand is old skool computery.  The results are not ranked.  There is no separation between close hits and distant hits.  Typos lead to null results (Google corrects them for you).  There is no preview of context.  You cannot interactively view the context from the search results UI.

When will Spotlight get a refresh?

But increasingly I found myself depending on these tools.  Why?  Because of the new paradigm of collaboration that they enable.  No longer must you sit in a cave and perfect a document before tossing over the wall.  In the new era, you don’t have to wait for a document to be finished to get feedback on it; multiple people can collaborate on it simultaneously, and everyone always has the latest version at all times.  It’s a better way to work.

But we are still stuck with that clunky browser-based user experience, that is now 12 years old and not much better than it was two years ago.  It’s usable, yes, but let’s be clear: Google Spreadsheets cannot hold a candle to Excel in the tightness of the user experience.

So when Microsoft announced over a year ago that it was going to match Google Apps I thought, that’s kind of nice.  The documents will be accessible from any web browser, and Google could use some competition.

But why are they racing to give up their evolved user experience?  It really is a pain to use web apps within a web browser; there are countless little user experience compromises that we must still live with.  Why must we have either cloud-hosted documents or a modern user experience?

After all, it’s not the web browser that makes web apps special.  It’s the fact that the apps and data are available everywhere and are shared in real time.

Vision to steal: Why doesn’t Microsoft let you browse, open and edit cloud-stored documents directly from within Office apps?  Users would have the best of both worlds: ubiquitous access (even from a web browser when needed), continuous publishing, and the most comfortable and responsive UI.

If you and I are co-editing a document, we’d see each others edits in Word or Excel or PowerPoint in real time (as in Google Wave).  This is not just a parlor trick; it’s a fantastic way to work collaboratively over distance while on speakerphone.  (We can expect to see much more of this.)

As a bonus idea to steal, cloud-hosted documents can be kept in sync with local copies (which is what Google Gears does).  Opening a desktop .DOC or .XLS that you have shared on the cloud would keep all edits synched to both places whenever possible.  The user could do offline editing and have the changes propagated when their Internet access is restored.

If the competition is zigging, you should be zagging, because by the time you catch up to where the competition is today, they will be somewhere else.  Don’t make it easy for customers to continue to pick the leader.  Add some enticing benefits that catch the customer’s attention and make them make a choice.  Then, over time, fill in the parts where you are behind.

No unlocking to make the volume UI available.  No having to ensure that you are in the right mode.  You can feel for it and operate it without even looking, with instant response. What a great idea!

Hmmm… come to think of it, I think my спални комплекти1979 Walkman had a similar UI.  Maybe other products should steal that idea.

Today, if you mark your beautiful template as stationery, when you subsequently open it it creates and saves a copy of the file under the same name with the word “Copy” appended, in the same directory.

This so does not make sense.  First, people often to store templates a central repository of tools, outside any project.  That is not where you want your new project-related instance to be.  Moving it to the right location is an added, unnecessary step.  Secondly, the name of the template is never going to be the right name.  If the user doesn’t think to change it immediately it will cause confusion and make it hard to find the document.  That’s more unnecessary work, including closing the document you just created to move and rename it and then reopening it.  These required steps make the stationery worse than useless — it’s less work to just manually copy a template file to the destination.

The better behavior (to steal) is to instantiate a new, unsaved, untitled document when the stationery file is opened.  Later, when the user saves, it  she can give it the right name and put it in the right location the first time.  In other words, just like how untitled documents have always worked.

[Didn't stationery once work like this?  Anyone have insight into how and why it went astray?]

Here is the workaround I’ve been using for a while.  Never use the Stationery bit.  Do mark templates as Locked bit.  This will have almost the correct behavior.  When you open it, it will look like you are editing the template.  But it will prevent you from saving over it, instead prompting you for a save location and name.

[Bonus idea to steal #1: why can't the File Save dialog give instant access to the Finder windows that are already open?  These are the most likely save destinations because they relate to the current project.]

[Bonus idea to steal #2: When you do Save As, why must it give you what amounts to an arbitrary default save location?  Why not default to the current folder?  This would match the scenario of retaining an old version of a document while branching it for further editing.]

To understand the irony we have to go way back through the annals of user interface history, a history that is unkind to Apple’s repeated efforts at improving the mouse.

In the early days of GUI computing, it was common for mice to have three or buttons. The problem was there was no standardization for what each button should do. As a result, various apps used different buttons for the same basic operations.

Sun's 3-button mouse, circa 1987

I remember programming on a Sun workstation that had one of these three buttons mice.  It was extremely difficult to master the basic tasks of clicking, dragging, selecting and opening.  One app would train your fingers to do it one way, and another app would train them in a different direction.

Apple’s 1984 Macintosh (and the Lisa before it) avoided this confusion by limiting the mouse to just one button. Users never clicked the wrong button because there was no other button to click. Click to select. Click and drag to move something. To open an icon on the desktop, use issue a bit of Morse code, and double-click it.  Dot dot.

1984 Apple Macintosh Mouse

In the early 90s, Microsoft and Apple one better. They reintroduced a second mouse button.  But this time they avoided the foibles its predecessors by establishing a rock-solid standard for what the second button would do.  The button would invoke a context menu on the clicked object and never anything else.

It was a welcome innovation in the progression of object-oriented UI’s that we now take for granted.  You could now right-click on any object to pull up a tailored list of actions that can be done on just that object.  It was a lot faster than hunting through all the menus for items commands that became available by the existence of the selection.  And it brought the most used tasks to the forefront, right under the cursor.

A 2-button Mouse by Microsoft (there was a plainer white mouse that came before this model, but I couldn't find an image of it)

[The unsung hero who pushed this standard through deserves a place in the User Experience Hall of Fame.  Anyone know the responsible party?]

Apple resisted this convention. Actually, different parts of Apple reacted differently.  The industrial design part of Apple resisted it, never dedicating a button to context menus.  But the OS software side supported the PC convention.  Right-clicking worked on the Mac with third party USB mice since before the dawn of Mac OS X.  It was a quirky position for Apple to take: it’s okay to have a mouse with two buttons, as long as it doesn’t have an Apple logo on it.

Apple’s hack for giving access to in-place menus was to have the user hold down the Control key and click menu.  It’s always been pretty clumsy for such a common task.

Even more clumsy was the little gear sprocket button that showed up in the button bar area, introduced a few years ago. This gave the hitherto invisible context menu a visible affordance, which sounds good in theory.  In practice I don’t know if people use it much.  And unlike in-place menus, it’s dissociated with the object it relates to.

Apple's context menu sprocket button

Innovation in mice continued its march forward without Apple. Around 1997, in the early days of the Worldwide Web, Microsoft introduced the scroll wheel between the two buttons.  You could now scroll a web browser or a word processing document without having to mouse over to the little scroll bar widget.  You could keep your gaze on the article you were reading and scroll the page almost telekinetically.  We’d never had to scroll so much before the web was invented, and the scroll wheel was a welcome advancement.

Microsoft mouse with scroll wheel

The right mouse button and the scroll wheel are so critical to basic productivity that any serious Mac user simply needed to buy a third-party mouse. Buying a Mac?  Buy a functional third party mouse to go with it.

In the late 90′s an apparent error in Apple’s lab led to the inadvertent release of a mutant puck mouse, which must have scampered through a door left ajar.  The puck mouse was perfectly round.  So round that you couldn’t feel which way was up.  It was very common for it to be at a slight angle when you moved it, causing the cursor to go careening off in a diagonal direction.   Luckily for the puck mouse, it had a cord, so defenestration was hard to achieve.

Apple's painfully symmetric puck mouse

(Later models added a little indent so you could feel which was was up.)

So Apple stuck to its guns, suffering from its ongoing affliction of button-phobia.  Form continued to triumph over function.  True simplicity lost out to the appearance of simplicity (as it does on the iPhone).

I suppose a second mouse button would mean that they surrendered. Or that they were desecrating the clean lines of their laptops or and mice with another button. Never mind that brining up a context menu is such a frequent operations.  (And please put out of your mind the fact that the keyboard already has about 76 other buttons for typing.)  That second mouse button would kill.  We’re trying to think different(ly) around here, people!  (See also: Apple’s Revolutionary Laptop With No Keyboard)

Apple continued its buttonphobic ways.  They even went backwards, to no visible buttons.  Instead of clicking a button with your finger, you apply pressure to the top part of the housing and the whole thing rocked forward as a click.

Apple's zero button mouse

Beautiful, right?  And that clear outer shell never got scratched up, because it was always kept in a desk drawer.  It didn’t help that the USB cable on this mouse was only long enough to reach the port on the (also functionally challenged but also transparent) keyboard.  It would not reach the USB port on the back of the noisy G4 tower under the desk.  Oh, yeah, and the (transparent) wire frayed easily.  Anyone with actual work to do put the mouse away and desecrated Apple’s sculpture by using a functional, ergonomic, ugly Logitech mouse.

Then came Apple’s Mighty Mouse. It too used the whole housing as one physical button switch.  It had a touch sensitive area under the fingertips, and you could bring up context menus by clicking on the right side with your middle finger. If, that is, you dug into preferences and activated the feature.  That’s right, at this point right-clicking is still not acknowledged as a mainstream thing.

There was just one catch: the touch panel would only register a right-click if you lifted your left (index) finger off the left area of the mouse.  Without knowing this critical piece of information, and practicing it enough to be automatic, right clicking was haphazard.  This was fatally unintuitive and aggravating.

Apple's Mighty Mouse

The Mighty Mouse was and is also loathed for its miniscule built-in trackball.  This innovation was supposed to allow for scrolling in all directions, but would jam up with dirt after a few weeks’ use.  Later Mighty Mice were cordless, so there was no saving the poor things from windows left open.

Which brings us to today, Tuesday October 20, 2009.

Apple has been adding gestures on its laptop trackpads for the last few years.  Those gestures were nice refinements, but not earth-shattering.  And they only worked when you were actually using the trackpad.  At a desk, if you use an external mouse, the trackpad and its fancy gestures are irrelevant.  On this date, Apple introduced the Magic Mouse, with, lo-and-behold, a trackpad built in.  You can still drag it around like a regular mouse, but you can also twiddle your fingers on it to do other tasks.

Apple's Magic Mouse, 2009

And here we finally arrive at the irony.  25 years after the 1984 Macintosh mouse – belligerently endowed with just one button for the ostensible sake of simplicity — we have a sleek little wireless mouse that lets you not only click, not only right-click, but also scroll, pan, zoom, and swipe using invisible gestures.

Simple, right?  :-)

But is it crazy enough to work?

I’m curious about how usable this integrated touchpad/button is going to be.  The video certainly looks compelling. Did they solve the Mighty Mouse’s right-click problem?  Will all these gestures be inadvertently triggered during regular clicking and dragging?

If it licks these problems, Apple will have, finally, trapped a better mouse.

[Update 10/22/09: Alas: "Right clicking requires a lifting of the left click finger, just like the Mighty Mouse".  Oh well.]

Requisite idea to steal

Why is it that web apps don’t get to use right-click events? This goes both for AJAX-style apps such as Google Wave, and Flash and Adobe Air web apps. That’s right, you cannot right click on an object to bring up its properties.  This a serious productivity limitation for SaaS apps, which are striving to catch up to the evolved usability of  desktop apps. [11/17/09 Update - I'm wrong wrong wrong.  Per the comments below, it is possible for AJAX and Flash/Air apps to tailor the context menu.  It's just that many apps just fail to do so.]

And here is an older idea to steal a different way to pan and scroll without resorting to gestures: make use of an accelerometer.

See also

• Panning & scrolling with a mouse by tilting
• Apple makes the trackpad a mouse button

—–

Philip Haine has been using Macs continuously since the original 128k model in 1984, for the most part as a fan boi. He is founder and principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision and build products that are even better than Apple’s mice.  He also writes the Product Vision Blog.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Most of the time you will see that I have the big monitor plugged in to my laptop.  When I do, I have things arranged a certain way. I put my e-mail on the laptop monitor. I tell the Dock to stay visible and not recede into the edge, because I can afford the screen space. I want my palettes in various productivity apps to be arranged so as to make efficient use of the big display while leaving plenty of real estate to do my work.  Scrivener and Inspiration need lots of space, so I want them to be maximized on the big screen. I want my instant messaging app to be down on the laptop monitor.

On other occasions, you will notice that the big monitor is not plugged in. It’s just me and a 15″ laptop screen.  You see me hide the Dock to free up precious space. Scrivener and Inspiration will still be maximized, but that of course means smaller height and width on the smaller screen.  You see palettes in my power tools arranged just so, to make best use of my smaller on-the-go set up.

You see me switch between these two configurations pretty regularly.  You should know now how I like things in each case.

So please, when I come and go and switch my workstation around, take care of these details for me so I can concentrate on my work.

This implies that:

• Each application needs to be aware of the various display configurations that are actually in use.  And each should keep track of UI layout so it can recreate it automatically when I move about.  The first few switches will still require the user to move things about.  But the UI will be trainable and it will learn over time.  This will save a lot of time diddling around with UI elements every time I move around.
• The Dock should learn (possibly with repetition) that you prefer it to be hidden on small screens and always visible on large screens.
• Treat “maximized” as a special state.  When the machine awakens to a smaller display, don’t put a 1900-pixel-wide window on a 1400-pixel-wide laptop display without resizing it.  And vice-versa: if a window has been told to be maximized, then make it maximized when moving to a larger display.
• When the configuration changes, put windows in reasonable locations.  (In moving to smaller displays, I find many windows stuck along the bottom edge, with only the title bar showing.)

This will also help in the future, when our world is in the cloud, and our workstation is any computer, anywhere.  Those workstations can come in any shape and it will behoove the software to arrange the workspace accordingly.

See also:

• Making efficient use of big displays (from almost four years ago)

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  He also writes the Product Vision Blog.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Money quote:

I am also praying that some genius from the late 90’s can help Apple develop a user friendly calender with an alarm.

I hate to break it to you Palm fans.  It’s officially true, the Palm Pre has thrown the usability baby out with the bathwater in its reinvention of the Palm platform.  Let’s hope this is just a growing pain for the new Palm.

That “cloud” is actually made up of racks and racks of servers. Those servers are not actually in the clouds, where it is quite cold, but down on the earth, where it’s warm and getting warmer.  Those racks of servers generate heaps of thermal energy, which requires yet more energy to keep cool.  Otherwise they melt onto one another like Hersheys in the glovebox.

The software architecture that makes these clouds of servers work is modular, and fault-tolerant and distributed.  They allow plug-and-play expansion when more capacity is needed.  They are built to withstand any node failing (with thousands of servers, several will break down every day).

And those nodes can be anywhere, since everything is connected.  But given a choice, it’s preferable to put them close to where they are needed, because things are faster that way.

The purpose of a space heater is to generate heat.  Heaters are pretty dumb.  That’s all they do.  They have an electric heating element, maybe some oil to circulate through and some fins to radiate the heat, a thermostat and that’s it.

What if a space heater instead had a bunch of cheap, older generation, heat-generating CPUs and a wireless connection?  You could crank up the number of processors and their clock speed for a nice cozy hearth, or turn them down a few GHz if you just needed to keep your nose from freezing overnight.

The cloud computing companies could even give you a few cents for each MIPS-hour your heater burns.

At a larger scale, an entire office floor could have computers built into its HVAC system.  Even our desktop computers could be enlisted for the job.  They are ridiculously overpowered for what we need them for most of the time anyway.  The building’s climate control system could instruct all those idle CPUs to do something productive with their downtime, while warming the office in the winter.  Those computers could even monitor the local temperature and provide more heat where it is most needed.

All of this would:

• do something productive in the process of heating your home or office
• reduce the cost of cooling servers
• distribute computing closer to where it is needed
• maybe control temperature in a breezy office to a finer degree
• maybe subsidize heating costs by donating cycles to the cloud

My wife, tactfully: “I think you have an idea that is ahead of its time.”

Yes, it could be a while before this idea is stolen.  [This would be a fun and compelling research project for some engineering & system design students.  Anyone?]

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps guide product leaders and their teams to generate ideas even more important than the Network Heater.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

It’s kind of cute, as long as the laptop has its own bedroom.

But, like a snoring dorm-mate, it’s the most annoying thing when you have no choice but to share sleeping quarters.  Such is the case in hotel rooms, or when a home office serves as an impromptu nursery for an eight-month-old.  The laptop causes the ambient room light to cycle from pitch dark to bright night light, piercing photons through your eyelids, keeping those synapses firing, and inhibiting sleep.

The analog remedy for both snoring roommates and obnoxiously glowing MacBook Pros is the same: get out of bed and smother it in a pillow.

What we need is a digital remedy, today’s idea to steal:

• Or, provide a preference to stop the throbbing glow
• Or, employ an ambient light sensor on the outside of the device to smartly control the throbbing glow.  By daylight, throb away.  When the room is dark, don’t.
• And while you’re at it, also dim the charging light when the room is dark. It, too, must be covered to keep the room dark enough for the laptop’s very young roommate.
• Or, just stop throbbing

As for snoring roommates, I’m unaware of a digital remedy.  Anyone?

A while back, I wrote:

“[The only way an iPod has communicates with you] is with its display, and that is useless when your eyes are on something else.  You already have the earphones in.  Why shouldn’t the iPod use them to speak with you? [..]

“[The system could]  pre-render text-to-speech of the tracks on the desktop before syncing to the device. The device would declare the names of the songs as you skip around: “Alicia Keys track three superwoman. (forward) four: No One. (forward) five: Like You’ll Never See Me Again.  [This verbal approach would also bring] badly needed playlists to the Shuffle.”

Over a year later, Apple make quite a hoopla over just this type of features to its third generation iPod Shuffle.  Check out its resemblance to the excerpt above:

“VoiceOver also tells you the names of your [songs and your] playlists, so you can easily switch between them to find the right mix for your mood. Without having to take your eyes off your run, your ride, or whatever you’re doing. [..]

How is this possible? First, iTunes reads your song information, then [generates] the announcements for the songs, artists, and playlists [on the computer]. Just sync your iPod shuffle with your computer and it really speaks to you.”

My original article provided details about other elements of the sonic design, including sound effects to convey how fast you were skipping between tracks, and how quickly you were rewinding.  I don’t have a recent Shuffle.  If you do, I’d appreciate if you could compare my original write-up with how Apple’s implementation really behaves.

Now that they are starting to speak to us, the next step is for our mobile electronics to listen to our verbal commands.

[Incidentally, I'm not deluded enough to think that this or any other ideas on this site were actually inspired by my postings.  Great minds, and all that.  But return traffic here has been steadily increasing so you never know.  If you, gentle reader, are privy of the back story of the Shuffle's sonic UI, please contact me; I'd love to hear about it and I won't tell anyone we talked.]

See also:

• Audio UI for Audio Players
• Using gestures and voice for access to key tasks on a mobile device

With a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.  [..] Is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button

A team at Stanford has demonstrated this feature (see the video halfway down the page).

Plus those idea robbers also stole another idea straight from my head: the ability to program the camera for all kinds of tricks.

However, their model is open-source software, and so it will be limited in use to real programmers.  This is nice, but I want Nikon and Canon to let any computer-literate person write – or visually snap together – scripts to be executed by the camera. (That’s the new idea to steal.)

This is an enabling technology that would let the end-user do all kinds of tricks:

• Adjust settings & preferences according to your rules (If it’s in Manual mode, fix the ISO.  If it’s in Aperture priority mode, use Auto-ISO.  If the flash is on, drop ISO to 100.)
• Set up a lightpainting program: blink the light for 3 seconds to indicate the start of the program, then open the shutter for 60 seconds while you paint, then beep for 5 seconds so you can pose, then take a flash image to capture you.
• Baby or lightning capture: With the camera on a tripod pre-bufferring video, and when a spike in lighting happens or the baby finally laughs, let the user press the remote to begin capture a few seconds earlier
• Wildlife capture: Pre-buffer video, and when motion is detected, start recording it from a second earlier.  Then capture stills every 10 seconds for the next minute, then wait for motion
• so much more

The scripts would be sharable and rated online among the community.  Serious photographers are a techie, enthusiastic bunch and this creative capability would go over nicely.

Photographers, what tricks would you teach your gear if it were easy and fun?

A big ongoing question is whether it will be possible for newspapers to stay afloat by charging for its content.  I happen to think it is possible, especially for those few papers with original, high quality, highly differentiated content.

But my point in this article is not to argue that it would work, but instead to stick my neck out and take a stab at the question of, if requiring payment were attempted, how such a system should be crafted.  My fear, and expectation, is that when paid online newspapers are introduced again, it will once again be done clumsily and greedily, and will foster user rebellion and further decline of journalism.

So here is a blueprint for another way.

Precedents

The system I propose rests upon elements of several precedents which provide proofs of concept:

• SMS messages - Each message is too cheap for the customer to think about (although in the aggregate, the price is enormous).  There is no purchase confirmation; it just happens.  Consumption is separated from payment, which happens at the end of the month.   (Someone tell me again that micropayments won’t work?)
• Ringtones – even at $1 or $2 it was cheap enough to be a no-brainer for status-conscious kids.  The purchase was also separated from billing.
• Electronic toll collection systems such as FasTrak or EZ-Pass.   I had read that bridge tolls increase far faster than otherwise when electronic payment is implemented (I can’t find the reference.  Anyone?).  It’s is a lot easier to cross the bridge without having to feel the pain of handing over a fiver each time.
• Apple’s iTunes Music Store - Anyone can download any song online for free from file sharing networks.  Yet lots of people pay to get it from iTunes Music Store.  Why?  It always boils down to their needs.  The iTunes store addresses the need for convenience (speed and streamlined purchase workflow), the need for audio quality (random downloads vary in quality), and the need for a clear conscious.  There is a market for legal.
• Apple’s iPhone app store - iPhone apps are so cheap that it’s almost a no-brainer to just buy them.  And you can buy them right from the phone, greatly reducing the purchase friction.  Estimated sales?  $2.5 billion per year.
• Skype - You only have to pitch in $10 occasionally.  The amount trickles down slowly as you call your distant relatives.  (Tell me again how micropayments don’t work?)
• Wall Street Journal online – offers a proof of concept that differentiated content can attract paying customers.
• Nintendo Wii game store, iStockPhoto and others deal with credits rather than dollar value.  Not necessarily the customer-friendliest trick, but it allows prices to be increased while obfuscating the normal pricing calculus.
• Credit cards – You only pay at the end of the month.  Credit cards divorce the desire to acquire from the pain of paying, and that makes people much more willing to spend.
• Amazon 1-click – Radically reduces the purchase friction.  You click that button and your mind switches modes from, “Should I buy it?  Let me think about it.” to “I bought it, now let me think about how to justify my actions.”

Elements of all these systems can be incorporated into our architecture for moving people to a paid model for newspaper articles.

Incidentally, I think it’s silly for people to make blanket statements that micropayments can never work or that people will never pay for online content.  Micropayments are nothing more than small payments.  Anyone buying a gumball out of a machine is making a micropayment.  That said, to make it work the content has to be valuable enough to be worth buying, differentiated enough to prevent migration to lower-cost competitors, cheap enough to not think about, and the payment mechanisms has to be streamlined enough that it does not impose its own burden of inconvenience.

Overall strategy

The solution requires some systems thinking to account for the psychology of visitors.  There is some social engineering going on here but I hope you don’t construe it as evil.  Society needs strong journalism and we’ve had a free ride for many years.  Those doing a good job of journalism deserve to be compensated well and we have to find a way to get from here (unsustainably free) to there (sustainably profitable).

The strategy involves these elements, which have been notably absent in prior attempts:

• Position ourselves to be on the consumer’s side.
• Overcome the barrier of having the customer pull out that credit card for the first time
• Boil the frog.  (Yes I know frogs don’t really allow themselves to be boiled slowly.)  Start the user off with plenty more free content, then make it so cheap they don’t care.  Give time for people to get used to the idea that there is no more free lunch, but make lunch extremely cheap.  Then ratchet up the price gradually profitability slowly as
• Make the transfer of money and credits as frictionless as possible.
• Separate the act of consuming from the act of exchanging money.  Avoid having people make purchase decisions.
• Plan to lose money for a while, as you transition the audience to a paid basis.  Getting greedy and trying to make a huge profit immediately will just leave you wondering why the frogs just keep jumping out of the water.

The system would work something like this:

1. Preparation

• Make it clear to visitors in advance that access to certain content will soon require credits.  Not because you’re greedy or mean, because  you can no longer survive without it, which is true.  The point is to combat the first instinct of critics that anyone who tries to charge for something is evil.
• Start as soon as possible, to space out the future price increases as far as possible.

2. Pricing and sign up

• Use credits as currency for accessing content, not cash.
• Do not expire credits (like some services we know)
• Give unlimited access to nonprofits and educational institutions, for good will.
• Give away a large number of free credits to anyone who wishes to continue reading the site.  Give enough free credits for 6 months of typical usage and convey clearly that this is the case.  The point is to soften the discomfort at transitioning to metered access.  Users may initially think, “This stinks!  I don’t want to pay!  But whatever, just give me the article I want to read; I can opt out later when my free credits expire.”  But as they use the site over time they will incubate in the thought that the content is actually worth something and think, “Well it’s not that much and fair is fair.”
• When the user signs up, require a valid credit card, PayPal account or direct withdrawal.  Don’t charge anything at this time; instead, deposit a few cents in the account.  The point is to disconnect the act of giving the credit card information from any purchase decision.  Getting over this hump is a major strategic turn.
• Give the user the choice of how much the auto-bill amount should be when the user runs out of credits.  $5, $10 or $20.  The point is to give the customer some level of control so they don’t feel like helpless victims.
• Make the initial price for reading an article so low, few will care:  2 credit per article, with one credit worth roughly one penny.
• Keep the price structure extraordinarily simple.  Make all the content deduct a single credit.  Don’t charge different amounts for different length articles or different “premium” articles.  Don’t make some content free and some paid.   Your goal is to avoid having people ever snap into purchase decision mode.
• Make the cost of credits an odd ratio, such as 1000 credits for $9.50.  This will be increased over time.
• Continue to serve ads and, of course, collect revenue for them.
• Allow for an ad-free version of the experience, for, say, 3 credits per article, whatever recoups the lost revenue.  Indicate in the box in the corner that this price level is activated.
• If you detect that ad blockers are being used, then, after a generous grace period, let the user know that they will be automatically switched to the ad-free experience in a few days.  Give instructions on how to disable their ad blocker if they would prefer otherwise.
• Offer unmetered access to the site for $50 a year.
• Be fair, and when the user hits the annual subscription amount, automatically upgrade them to unmetered access and let them know.  You could bilk them as, say, cellphone carriers and banks do, but remember, you want customers to see you as the good guys to lower their resistance to paying you.

3. Reading / purchasing experience

• Show the meter of credits remaining in a box at the top-right corner at all times.
• Indicate within that box the price of each article: 1 credit per article.
• When the user clicks a link for an article, just deduct the credit.  Don’t request confirmation.  Put a small note in the box in the corner saying that a credit was deducted for this article.
• The price is for unlimited use of that article.  Don’t charge them multiple times for re-reading an article they already bought.  Remember:  you’re on their side.
• Let the user click an undo button if they didn’t want the content.  Don’t haggle; give the customer ample benefit of the doubt.  Maybe they clicked by accident, maybe they didn’t get what they expected, or maybe they don’t like the writing.  Have a money back guarantee and just credit the content back.  Say something only if you notice the right being abused.
• When the user has 25 credits left, put up a note saying that their account will be auto-billed for $5 or $10 or $20 worth of credits once their account falls to 10 credits.

4. Dealing with piracy

• Take a soft stance on the inevitable content piracy that will ensue.  Focus on the mainstream users who are willing and able to pay and who don’t have the inclination to bother with the workarounds.  The main site will always be faster, more cohesive and more convenient than the rip-off sites and thus differentiated.
• Be gentle with content pirates; they will all blog your cease-and-desist letters.  Go after the worst offenders.  Say, sorry, we wish we could give away the content for free.  But we are forced to prosecute copyright violators otherwise we lose the copyrights.
• Over time gradually increase the exchange rate of credits per dollar and/or the number of credits to read an article.  If you devalue existing credits (e.g. by doubling the cost of reading an article from 1 to 2 credits) then be fair and make existing credit balances whole (e.g. by doubling the number of old credits).

5. Bonus points

• The hard part:  Establish a consortium of content providers.  Newspaper creators, TV vendors, eBook vendors, bloggers, etc. that all will run on the same system and display the price in the same way.  Signing up for any one service signs someone up for all of them.  The point is to reduce the sign-up pain.  The less the user has to whip out the credit card, the better.  This may be the only chance that the smaller players have.
• Different types of content may cost a different number of credits.  Use as a basis the amount of time the content keeps the user occupied.  If an average article takes 5 minutes to read and costs 1 credit, make a 25 minute TV show 5 credits.

No matter what, the newspaper business will contract.  There are just too many papers out there relying on syndicated (read: commodity) content, that have too little to offer.  But for the top papers ready to try again to charge for content, they should follow an approach like this that accounts for buyer psychology.

Readers, what did I miss?  Please pass this article on to people who might benefit from it.

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

“I would just caution people that think they’re going to walk in here [to the cellphone market],” said Ed Colligan.  “We’ve struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he added. “PC guys are not going to just knock this out.”

Apple, the novice, didn’t merely walk into the business. It climbed a 10-meter platform and executed a back two and a half somersaults with two and a half twists in the pike position.

The iPhone remains best-in-breed three years later.  It is raking in huge swaths of the total market and is a testament to the power of product vision.

I love my iPhone and use it enthusiastically, daily, for all sorts of things I could not previously imagine.

There. Now that the props are out of the way, it’s onto the gripefest.  I pick on Apple a lot for three reasons.  First, because their products are the only ones worthy of criticism.  Secondly, because I use them and know them intimately.  Thirdly, I want to fight the perception that Apple can do no wrong; that Apple design is equivalent to good design; that everyone should strive to design their products just like Apple.

The reality is that Apple has a number of bad design habits which others should avoid to create products that are even better than Apple:

• Apple sacrifices actual simplicity for the appearance of simplicity (parodied scathingly by the Onion).
• Apple puts form ahead of function, to the actual detriment of users.
• Apple is can be obstinately not-invented-here, depriving users of good ideas that are well-known and work
• Apple has a tendency to bolt new features on, accumulating complexity over time, rather than blending them in.
• Apple often fails to identify and streamline the most common, frequent tasks (you know, such as pausing playback on a music player or typing an email message into a mobile device or placing a phone call).

My post from a year ago critiquing the iPhone calendar continues to garner a steady stream of traffic and amen-brothers.  In that post I was focused only the calendar.  But there are several other aspects of the iPhone that stick in my craw daily.

1. The phone app itself is terribly inefficient and demanding of the user’s brain and eyes for the most common tasks.  On my 12-year-old flip phone I could press and hold one number to dial a frequently used number.  I could do it in two seconds, without even having to look at the device.  On the iPhone I have to wend my way through the modes to get to the page of favorites, then I have to look at the screen and target the right entry, possibly scrolling.  [Voice dialing may or may not be a panacea for this; my iPhone 3G doesn't have that feature.]

   Dialing an arbitrary contact: I have over 3,000 contacts, which makes the primary navigational UI, flick-to-scroll, useless.  Searching by typing should be the primary way of finding a contact from the entire set.  (In contrast, the Palm Treo’s had a clever feature where you could type the first letters of someone’s first and last name to jump straight to them.  To dial me you might type “pha” for philip haine.)

   The iPhone doesn’t learn your habits and tune its behavior to your patterns.  If I search for Mark, it always presents me with the same set of 28 Marks in the same order, beginning with Mark A, even though I have only ever called up Mark D in the last year.  (My favorite precedent of a UI which tunes itself automatically based on your real-world habits is LaunchBar).

2. I have loathed the home screen / app launcher since the beginning.  It scales poorly.  When searching for an app I feel like a flicking idiot, paging madly through screen after screen of icons to find an app.  And if you move one icon it shuffles the rest of them on the page.  So much for positional stability and muscle memory.  Trust me, there are better paradigms for navigating and organize scores of applications.
3. The new Spotlight feature that lets you search the whole device is welcome.  But it suffers from Apple’s habit of bolting on new features.  For example, the Spotlight page is now better at looking up someone to call than the dedicated phone app (which ought to tell you something about the phone app.)  Yet when you find someone to call, can you just tap the person and choose a number?  No, that would be too blended and efficient.  Spotlight instead passes you off to the the Phone app to complete the task.  Adding insult to injury is the UI friction of the zooming away visual from Spotlight and then zooming into the phone app.  I’m busy; just give me a dial button.
4. iTunes is tired.  It is simply too clumsy to move media back and forth between the computer and the iPhone.  Managing playlists is a chore.  Backing up the iPhone takes a ridiculous amount of time (up to an hour for me) and often fails.  Coverflow is distracting eye candy.  I once lost all my apps by syncing.  My calendar has never synced properly.As a result of all of these problems syncing, I do none of it.  Yes, that’s right: the exact same scenario that Apple+iPod+iTunes exploited in the early days of MP3 players has come around again.  The process of syncing is so onerous that non-use is a better solution than dealing with the hassle.  Time to reinvent iTunes as Apple did with Mac OS 9 and iMovie.
5. Alarms, alerts and notifications are inconsistent and not trustworthy.  Each feature has its own policy on how to alert you.  I had to really study the UI to isolate the idiosyncrasies of each.For example, an SMS message will beep and buzz every few minutes, indefinitely, to make sure you find out about the change of restaurant plans.  But if the same message happens to be left as a voicemail you’d better be paying attention, because voicemail beeps and buzzes just once and thereafter remain silent.

   And unlike every cellphone or answering machine built in the past 20 years, the iPhone has no blinking message indicator light to let you know there is something you are missing.  The only way to know you have a voicemail message waiting is to check it.

   In contrast, the countdown timer in the Clock app is like a drill sergeant.  It will insistently remind you to feed the parking meter now, repeating the alarm continuously and indefinitely until you stop it.  If left upstairs it will vibrate the iPhone clear off your nightstand and onto the floor.

   Different still is the Clock app, which is kind enough to completely ignore the silent mode switch, so you can hear it over those pesky stage performers.

   Appointment alerts take a kinder and gentler approach.  They will prod you gently every five minutes to tell you about the upcoming meeting.  If your volume is turned down it will do so quietly.

   The clock app lets you snooze alarms, but you can’t snooze the countdown timer, nor calendar alerts.  For example, you cannot tell the calendary app,  “Thanks, I know the phone meeting is in 15 minutes; remind me once more in 10.”

   The alarm clock and the countdown timer lets you specify the duration down to the minute.  But the calendar appointments limit your choices to 5, 15, 30, 60 and 120 minutes, which is just not enough specificity.

   There are even more quirks that make it hard to understand the rules and predict the behaviors: different alert options whether the device is on standby or on, message indicators that make you do the busy work to visit the Phone and Messages apps just to clear their status, repeat options that differ between the alarm clock, the calendar app, and iCal.

   The entire paradigm of iPhone notifications deserves a nice, healthy, systemic rethink.

6. The slide to unlock feature lacks common sense.  It is a dexterity test to perform with one hand.  And if the phone times out while you’re reading a screen, it should let you turn the device back on within a few seconds, bypassing the swipe.
7. The lack of real background processing is a huge limitation.  “Oh but we want to save your battery” says Apple.  But what about when the device is charging?  How about doling out limited slivers of time?  How about giving the user the prerogative to decide who may work in the background, as is done with notifications?  This one smells of disingenuous self-interest – SMS, voice mail, money makers, would be threatened if third parties could play on a level playing field with Apple.

   Background processing is an enabling technology and when other platforms exploit it it will be clear what iPhone users have been missing.

8. Mac and the iPhone are not very friendly towards one other. They are on the same wireless LAN most of the time.  Why don’t they just say Bonjour, and just trickle sync in the background throughout the day to keep my Apple world in sync?  (Surely not because Apple wants me to subscribe to Mobile Me?)
9. If I’m re-downloading an app I’ve already purchased, why do I have to click BUY NOW and then have it tell me that it’s free because I already bought it?  The device should just say hey, you own this, help yourself.
10. The app store approval process is a bottleneck that is truly hurting users.  Bugfixes cannot be dispatched instantly to users and are delayed for upwards of a week.
11. Apple’s patriarchal control over what apps show up is an idea that is playing itself out.  Protecting the users from badness is one thing.  Artificially protecting Apple’s interests at the expense of the customer’s is another.

    Every app that Apple prohibits is a set of needs that will never be fulfilled by the iPhone. The controversy over the Google Voice app rejection is only the most vivid recent example.  When the Pre eventually gets its act together we will, hopefully, see how different the world can be.  Apple could use the competition to keep it honest.

Given the triumph that was the iPhone, these issues were tolerable for the first year or so.  But we are now at the third version of the iPhone OS.  It’s time for Apple to get back and fix the basics.

Until they do, there is an opening for competitors to exploit.

Here is an idea to steal for whichever competitor is first to trump the iPhone interaction design:  launch an advertising campaign with billboards that trumpet the ease of use and efficiency advantages: “Call your spouse.  iPhone: 6 steps.  Pre: 2 steps.  The Palm Pre.  For busy people.”  “Move an appointment.  iPhone: 13 steps.  Palm Pre: 5 steps.  The Palm Pre.  For busy people.”  You get the idea.

Readers: what serious long-standing iPhone issues did I miss?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

There were two main options. If you give mobile surfers the whole site (Option 1), it will be slow, and it will be poorly formatted to the small screen.  If you reformat the websites to make them fast to load and easy to read (Option 2), you lose the authenticity of surfing the real world.

The iPhone took a clear stance in favor of the former alternative.  They download and display the whole website quite accurately.  They were able to pull this off (years after the Palm initiative) because of important technical advancements: higher res screens that allowed small text to be legible, a scalable graphics and text rendering layer that allows pages to be zoomed to any level of magnification, and 3G & WiFi networking that made loading the full, original web page directly, without a transcoding proxy, tolerable.

And this works.  Sorta.  Apple’s early iPhone ads featured someone pinch-zooming into an article blurb on the New York Times home page.  Well, this just so happens to be a narrow newspaper-like column of text that actually lends itself to reading on the small display of a mobile phone.

Most prose on the web is not so narrow.  In real life, reading a web page as originally formatted involves a lot of laborious pinching and scrolling, both horizontal and vertical.  It’s so laborious that I have found it simply too much work to read articles this way on my iPhone.

Instead, I channel all of my iPhone articles through an app that caches and reformats it for the small screen. (I happen to use Instapaper, which I have found edges out its close competitor, Read It Later.)  It’s a great solution, and as a bonus, it even increases my productivity: rather than getting lost in the surf when I am at my computer supposedly working, I click the Read Later button and channel it off to my iPhone for reading during downtime.

But importantly, Instapaper reformats the web content so it’s very easy to read on the iPhone.  The text is as large as you need it to be, it syncs quickly since it cuts out the graphics, and no evil horizontal scrolling is involved.  Instapaper also has a brilliant tilt-to-scroll feature that makes scrolling feel like it’s not a task at all, just a subtle change in the angle at which you are holding the device.  This experience is a night-and-day difference from attempting to read the original web page that was designed for a computer display crammed onto a screen that fits in the hand.

The only remaining trouble is that moving everything through Instapaper is extra steps, and I am still forced to skip some content because of it.

Which brings us to today’s idea to steal:  To Apple, and anyone else who creates web browsers for mobile experiences:  it’s great that you can render a web page accurately.  Thanks, and congratulations.  But for actual readability, please provide the option to quickly load and reformat a page for the small screen.  Support both Option 1 and Option 2.

(Oh, and while you’re at it, you should pick up on what Instapaper has discovered and build in support for offline caching and reading, so it’s available to all applications.)

Front Row, Spaces, Exposé, Dashboard, Time Machine, Stacks and the iApps have continually expanded the basic rules by which the graphical user experience operates,  making it harder to predict, harder to learn, and unnecessarily complex. No new Mac feature appears without another surprising jack-in-the-box animation or mind-bending world-within-a-world paradigm shift.

This is not so bad for people who have been continually using Macs every step along the way since 1984 (like Steve Jobs, or me).  But it’s an increasing challenge for the new user, the less technically savvy, and the switcher.

Features that are bolted on violate two of my top principles of user experience architecture:

1. Minimize the bag of things the user needs to learn. Do not add things to the bag lightly.  Try and find something to remove from it.  [Consistency, by the way, is a sub-case of this rule.]
2. When adding features, blend them in, don’t bolt them on. Each bolted-on UI adds to the bag and diminishes the coherence, elegance and simplicity of the whole.

With all those trademarked features and their funky UI’s, Mac OS’s bag of things to learn is becoming positively santaclausian.

This is not a push for UI conservatism.  It’s wonderful that Apple continually challenges and improves past conventions.  But please, don’t leave us with seven different conventions in one package, which is where we are today.

As software ages, the fun and important architectural challenge — and a real test of a designer’s ability — is to work out how to blend new features in, rather than just bolting them on. We have to ask, “If the system had these features from the beginning, how would it have been designed?”  The user shouldn’t be able to tell where one era’s design team left and another one picked up.

Blending Alt-Tab behavior into the Dock

Take, for example, the Alt-Tabbing UI to switch apps, which was (rightfully) stolen from Windows for inclusion in Mac OS X.

We already had a way of switching apps: clicking on icons in the dock.  But it required reaching for the mouse.  Alt-tabbing provided a way switch apps without moving one’s hands from the keyboard.  Here is how it has looked for several years:

Here, with the Dock and the Alt-Tab UI visible, we see two ways of displaying open apps, and two ways of switching between them.  They are shown in different places, in different ways with different rules.

The Alt-Tab UI sorts its icons unpredictably.  (The order mirrors the Z-order of open windows, a deck that is shuffled as you switch windows.)  The user cannot develop a spatial memory of what is where because they keep shuffling around. And the location of items in the Dock has no bearing on the order in which the same icons are presented in the alt-tab UI.

The interaction design challenge is: rather than bolting on the Alt-Tab UI, could the functionality be blended with the existing Dock without diminishing the effectiveness of either?  Here is an approach I’ve been sitting on for a while:

Before the alt-tab:  Dock appears as usual

When the user keys down on Alt-Tab, the Dock icons of the open apps stand apart from the others.  Here is a quick & dirty mockup of one way to do that:

During Alt-tab (alternative 1): active apps jump forward; inactive apps which aren’t part of the alt-tab cycle are suppressed

Alternative 2

In this variant, the icons jump out of the dock into the familiar Alt-Tab UI.  Suppressing the inactive Dock icons lets the user visually estimate how many key presses are needed.  The most recent app is the first one to be highlighted, preserving the ability to toggle between the two recently used apps with one keystroke.  Subsequent Alt-Tabs walk through successive open apps, in the usual order they appear in the Dock.

Here is a variant that is even more naturally blended in with the Dock:

During Alt-tab (alternative 2): inactive apps are dimmed back; alt-tab grows the current selection

In this alternative, the inactive apps are dimmed back, and the current selection grows.  This borrows the Dock’s pre-existing magnification feature.  It’s even more seamlessly blended with the Dock behavior.

Et voila, Alt-Tab functionality without having to bolt on another paradigm.  The order of the apps is stable and predictable, and leverages the user’s spatial sense of what apps are where.

The key lesson: as software ages, be wary of layering on new UI paradigms.  Take the time to study how things already work, and find ways to make the new features and old features feel like they’ve been together all along, and were designed by the same team.

See also:

• Bring related windows forward during Alt-Tab
• What is the Alt-Tab order?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

The first slot is reliably the most recent other app, and so issuing a single Alt-Tab toggles between the two most recent apps.

Beyond that it gets random pretty quickly.  It seems like it’s trying to order the icons in LIFO order, but I often find a recent app buried down in the 8th position.

It’s been like this for years, and it makes task switching more of a chore than it should be, because you have to work harder to scan the icons for the app you want.  And it’s only going to get worse as we upgrade to computers with a cushy 8GB of RAM.

Can anybody tell me what that the algorithm is for the order of the icons in the alt-tab UI?

See also:

• Bring related windows forward during Alt-Tab

Why is the Mac icon smiling?

Goodbye historic body of work.  I am going to miss you.

The strongest influence on reputation isn’t what a company says about its product, it’s what people actual experience with it.  Whether customers love or hate your offering, they are sure to tell two friends, and so on. The channels for doing so are myriad, and the message is a far more credible and influential.

And so the most powerful way for us to establish a valuable brand is by consistently creating great products.

Duh, right?

Yet take General Motors, which keeps trying to convince us through its words, not its actions, that we’ve changed, baby, we swear.

One need only rent a GM car to be reminded that this is not the case.  Each rental event is powerful negative advertisement for GM, reconfirming the “hoary old conventional wisdom” about GM’s lackluster quality.

This is not entirely GM’s fault.  We who rent cars are notoriously price-sensitive.  If rental agencies were to spring for more expensive and enjoyable cars they’d have to raise rental rates, and they’d instantly lose business to lower-cost competitors.  Rental agencies need to acquire cars as cheaply as they can to keep prices down.

But this still doesn’t solve GM’s brand problem.  What might GM do about it?  Here are some possible strategic visions for them to steal:

• Option 1. Spin off a new, separate brand and separate models for the rental market, and distance them from the GM brand.  Only permit premium vehicles to be rented under the GM badge — cars that will leave renters with a positive impression of the brand.  Forbid any sub-par car from carrying the GM nameplate.
• Option 2. Think of car rentals not as a profit center but as advertising opportunities.  Only permit GM cars to be rented that will reflect well on the brand.  Give the rental agencies a break on price to make this possible, or perhaps lease the cars to the rental agencies or buy them back after they start to show poorly.
• Option 3. Throw in the towel on the old GM brand.  It’s horribly tainted and will take a decade and a half a billion dollars to repair.  Spin up a fresh new brand for vehicles to be sold to consumers that has no “G” and no “M” anywhere.

And of course, support the brand by making nothing but world-class quality cars from now on.

Any other options?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Anyone whose job it is to teach others should read this, every month, forevermore.

My critique of the iPhone calendar continues to be one of the most commented on this site.  Unfortunately, we are going to have to continue our wait.

Well, I should clarify.  The current Google workflow is just fine for searches for which there is one clear, perfect hit to pursue.  One search, a bit of scanning, and one click to get to the results.

What Google is missing is that finding an answer often involves hunting through several sources.  Google could be made significantly more efficient by considering this larger workflow.

Here is the typical best-practices workflow for checking out multiple hits from Google:

1. Type in a search
2. Skim the results for hits that may be credible.
3. Control-click the links that may have the answer you are looking for into new tabs.  This could be many tabs.
4. Peruse the tabs one by one.
5. Search within the page for the results you are looking (it could take some digging).
6. Once you find the answer you are looking for, go back and close the rest of the tabs.

It’s up to the end-user, using facilities in the browser to efficiently examine multiple search engine hits.

Here is the design to steal:  Search engine results don’t require very much width.  So why not show the search results in one column and a preview of the destination page in another?  Clicking a link would still go directly to the destination page.  But there are additional clear buttons to view the destination page (or its faster, cached version) in another pane. The new workflow might look something look like this rough mockup:

Step 1. Type in a search and get search results

Step 2. Click the Cache button next to pertinent search result to instantly see the cached version.

The cached version appears much more quickly than loading the page from the destination site.

The user could also click “Show page” to fetch the latest, live version.

Step 3. If that isn’t the result you needed, click on other cached results

Here is the result after clicking “Show cached” button for a different search hit:

The page is pre-scrolled to the area that most closely matches the search and the relevant section highlighted.  This saves the user from having to work as hard to find the useful information within the results page.

Step 4. If you want to read the destination page, click into it.

If the user has found a useful page there is a clear way of going to it.  The search results would disappear and the entire browser window would show the destination page.

A further optimization

If Google had clear a sense of what the top hit would be for a given search, it would take the liberty of loading it by default, without the user having to click any links.  This effectively integrates the “I’m Feeling Lucky” functionality with the regular search results.

What is going on?

This solution is made possible by the larger screens we now have.  They are wide enough that we can see both the search results and a useful part of the destination page at once.

In this design approach the search results behave like a vertical set of tabs. You don’t have to manage your own browser tabs, which confers several benefits:  (1) You don’t have to work as hard to find the results within the destination pages.  Since Google is controlling the presentation of the results it can highlight the relevant parts nicely.  (2) You don’t have to worry about the memory drain of having many browser tabs open at once.  (3) You don’t have to clean up the tabs after you have found what you were looking for.  (4) And one click on each search result is enough to peruse its content, as opposed to one Ctrl-click to open the results in a tab, another click to go to that tab and another click to close the tab when you are done.  One click instead of 3 for each search result you visit.  If you have to check out four hits to find your answer, that’s four clicks instead of twelve.

For best results, the cache would be fast.  It must be, because it is competing with the efficient alternative of ctrl-clicking tabs and having the browser load the pages in parallel in the background.

Content owners may not be all that thrilled with a search engine employing this approach.  It encourages access to the cache rather than hitting the target site directly for the guaranteed freshest content displayed as the site owner intended.  Google might do is set up an API whereby site owners could find out how often their site is being served up from Google’s cache.  [Readers, do they do this already?]

[As usual, if you know someone who might be able to do something with this idea, please forward them this article.]

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Since then I’ve added a couple of other power tools to my frequently used set.

I drank the DevonThink Pro Kool Aid.  DevonThink is a general note taker and snippet database.  It’s hard to get how useful and important such a tool is until you have used it for a while.  The functionality should be built into the OS.  [That's a vision to steal, btw.]

I also started using Scrivener to organize and compose long articles and the book.  Simple and wonderful.  It’s what Word would have become 15 years ago had Microsoft realized that writers need word processors to help them think.

(Interestingly, both these Mac-only tools use TextEdit at their core.  They also rest on the Mac’s package architecture that lets a document contain other documents.)

Judging from Firefox it must be circa 2001.  Otherwise, why would Firefox insist on using Stuffit to expand .zip archives?

The year cannot be, say, 2009, because by then the Mac will certainly have had unzipping capability built-in for years, rendering the clunky and obtrusive StuffIt completely obsolete.

Now, if I can only figure out how to get my Mac to stop syncing the system clock forward to 2009…

Find the most qualified user for the design in question. It could be someone who’s used the product for years or who’s written a book about it, or who is on the engineering team.

Show this expert user the design and see if he or she can make sense of it as you are expecting regular users to.

If they can, so far so good.  Continue designing or test with less apt users.

If not, your design has failed the Einstein test. The most qualified users of your product are incapable of figuring it out on their own, and therefore, there is no  hope that regular people will be able to. Go back to the drawing board.  If it fails the low bar, it is certain to fail the high bar.

This test is slightly counter-intuitive; common practice has it that you should test against typical users, not experts.  But there are a surprising number of designs out there that fail the Einstein test.

What examples springs to your mind?  Did you have any experience with doing something simple simple that you, as an expert computer user, should have been a snap?  Please comment with examples.

Usually after about a year I’m pining for a hardware upgrade and averting my eyes from the Apple store.  But I’ve had my current machine for 2.5 years and it’s still going strong and running the latest version of everything with aplomb.

With one exception.  As my tool set is growing, I am wishing for more RAM.  3GB isn’t cutting it anymore.  I have to keep a close eye on MemoryStick app in the dock to make sure I don’t run out of RAM and start the descent into the swapfile swamp, from which  a reboot is the only rescue.

So in a moment of weakness I surfed over to store.apple.com to see how I might be living. I was surprised to see this:

At left, a brand new midrange Macbook Pro, $2500.  At right, the specs for my 2.5 year old MBP.

They are roughly the same!  Especially since I upgraded the RAM to 3GB a long time ago (cheap) and my hard drive to this fast, quiet, inexpensive Seagate 320GB drive last week ($90 bucks including shipping).  The only appreciable difference is that the newer machine goes to 4GB.

Wow, 2.5 years goes by and a machine with roughly the same specs is still $2500.  I am not sure what to make of that.  Apple continues to do a good job squeezing out margins on their premium (and worth it) products.  Perhaps the performance/battery life curve is taking a breather at a local maximum.

According to the MacRumors buying guide the Macs are all due for a refresh soon.  Let’s hope Apple hits us with more than a few sharp bevels.  It’s overdue.

I have messages with the typical subject line, “Checking in”.   As you can see, it’s threading messages I sent and received yesterday with messages from four and six months ago.  What’s more, there are three different sets of recipients. There is no way that this is a continuation of the same conversation.

So here’s a design to steal to improve threading:

• if the subject is the same but the recipients are different, consider it a different thread.
• If the recipients are the same, and the subject is the same, but a lot of time has passed, take a look inside the message. If there is little or no quoting of the earlier messages ( As happens when messages are replied to), then consider it a different thread.

[Readers: Is this problem present in other mail programs? Please comment.  And, as usual, if you know someone at Apple, please send them this feedback.]

I thought that this sort of thing was behind us.  What happened to just dragging an item into the Applications folder?

This design is old.  It came was modeled after installer from the Windows 3.1 era.  You’ve seen it, the one that starts off, “The Install Wizard will now guide you through the setup process.”  Gee thanks, now I know to roll up my sleeves.  (How about if it just installed the software?)

Apple has been exemplary at questioning and slashing out wasteful steps.  Apparently they haven’t gotten to this old thing.

Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?

English translation:  Twitter lets anyone toss their transient thoughts into the ether for anyone in the universe to listen in on.  This is useful if you know of people who say interesting things.  You can subscribe to such people — many of them — and then conveniently track their utterances over the course of the day.  And this can be very interesting indeed.  It is like being on the listening end of a cocktail party conversation where the other person says something that makes you pause and go, “huh!” (*) Serendipity happens several times a day, and it becomes addictive.

The problem is that you only every hear from people you already know of and to whom you have already subscribed or followed.  If someone you don’t know of says something brilliant about something you care about (say, cats or Madonna or product vision) you won’t hear about it unless you go out of your way to search for it.

To help identify the topic of their dispatches into the Ether, Twitter users have taken to appling keywords (a.k.a. tags) to them.  But Twitter doesn’t officially support keywords or tags.  So people make up their own and tack them into their 140 character Twitter message.  By convention, to identify the tag as such, they start them with the hash symbol (#) and call them hashtags.  Hashtags look like #catscomposite triple beat or #madonna or #productvision.

The problem is you cannot subscribe to hashtag traffic directly, as you subscribe to people. (You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the hashtag, which means going use another program.  The benefits of centralization and serendipity are lost.

So I repeat:

Um…

Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?

—–

*This doesn’t apply if the people you follow insist on telling you about their flight delays or what they just ingested.

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost

The author’s vision to steal includes:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. [..] A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Have grad students come down from the ivory tower and pile onto the challenges of the day. Sounds like a plan!

More on Apple’s Buttonphobia at: Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone and in this wicked Onion piece:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I (heart) Obama, but it sucks to see him expend precious first-hundred-days political capital — and money — on this self-correcting problem.  Leaving the schedules as is would have an economic perk: it would make the remaining 6 million households to buy converters or take the opportunity to upgrade their TVs — a nice boost infusion to consumer electronics retailers.

That said, if we are going to make them switch, there is probably a better way to go about it.

But first, some key observations:

1. People tend to act reactively.  They won’t act until they sense a problem, which means further delays will not fully solve the problem.
2. Reaching everyone with traditional ads for the switchover are extremely expensive, and of limited efficacy.  (See point 1.)
3. Who says we have to change cold turkey?  Why not pull it off in stages?

Here is the design to steal:  Give stragglers increasingly bitter tastes of what will happen if they don’t switch.   Disable analog broadcast of regular programming, showing instead a 10-minute public-service infomercial loop on all analog channels, with a phone number and website for more information.

The five week schedule might look like this:

• Warning shot:  Disable analog broadcasts for one hour next week during a low viewing period, say Monday 8-9 am. This will make headlines and get people talking.  Publish the schedule of analog brown-outs that every newscaster across the country will read.
• Give people a week to switch, then fire the second warning shot:  Disable analog for 3 hours on a Saturday morning with the same message on how to transition.
• Third warning shot a week later: Disable analog for 4 hours on a Sunday evening.
• Fourth warning shot: Disable analog from 6-11 on a Monday night.
• Fifth warning shot: Disable analog from 6-11 on a Thursday night.

Here is an even bolder approach:

• Designate a Thursdays as no analog programming day.  Every week, turn off analog broadcasts for the whole day.

Two other refinements to the idea:

• In additional to the tough love, station owners could sell advertising between replays of the public-service infomercial, but only to advertisers providing products and services involved in the transition.
• If there is a local or national emergency, stations would be allowed to start re-broadcasting in analog for the public safety.

Of course this will be painful for viewers and advertisers.  But it will be way less painful than the cold-turkey approach.

It’s natural for us to have such partitions.  Our identities are different when we are dealing with our parents, our close friends, our colleagues, our students.  It’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with it.  We need to be able to tell fart jokes to your old high school buddy one moment, be silly with our children the next, then act professional at a meeting with senior management.

This is precisely the protocol that Facebook violates, by having all “friends” be on the same plane, be they friends, parents, work colleagues or nieces.

On the one hand this is a good thing.  It makes us all chillax a bit about the various pretensions we uphold in the spheres of our life.

On the other hand, it’s a bad thing. because despite the Facebook culture, most of us do still have that need to keep our worlds from colliding.  The stories of people who inadvertently made fools of themselves at work for what they did over the weekend are legend. And sometimes, you want to share something silly with one group, that your parents, or your kids, or your employer just should not see.  Without control over who gets to see information you post, prudent people must keep their edgy side under wraps.  Controversial topics that might  offend people whom you don’t want to hurt must go unspoken.

So here is the design to steal for Facebook: allow us to define spheres of friends and place each friend in one more more sphere.  When we post something, give us the option of limiting who gets to see it: everybody, or just certain spheres.

This same facility could be used for special interest sub-groups among your friends.  You could have a sphere for your college classmates, your high school classmates, your club, and so on, and post statuses or pictures that only they would see.

Allowing spheres would open up all kinds of new usage patterns and prevent users from having to water down the information they broadcast.  Go to it, Facebook!

(They were probably working on this when I published my article, but I’ll take credit anyway.)

Wired wrote:

Isn’t it about time your portable player had Heart and Ban buttons on it for personalizing customized radio stations that update with a single click via WiFi? We thought so.

I think so too!

There are several other interesting variants of the Heart/Ban or Thumbs Up/Down concept back in my original posting that the Slacker design doesn’t represent, so check it out.

It’s great to see so much innovation happening in the digital music space.  The one thing I crave is higher fidelity streaming stations.  It wasn’t until I dusted off the turntable I used to DJ with, and dropped the needle into the grooves of a 25-year-old album that I realized what I had been missing.  After listening to MP3′s and 128k-160kbps streaming audio for so long, I had forgotten how much better music can sound.

So here is a follow-up idea to steal: for $4 per month (what Slacker charges for the ad-free version of its service) raise the audio fidelity that will make my ears and my hifi happy.

Over the course of a typical excursion across the city recently I used eight different apps without thinking about it.  Not for the sake of using them, but because I had real problems to solve.  The apps were: Google Maps with GPS to get me to the appointment, email to see if a friend responded to a coffee request, SMS to confirm, Yelp to find a coffee shop, phone to finalize, NYTimes, Facebook and Wikipedia to catch up on news while I waited, photo app to grab a snapshot of my friend.  These were the scenarios we envisioned circa 2000 when I did some vision consulting with Palm.  They have now become a reality in a sleek package.

I’ve ranted about the iPhone and criticized its inefficient UI and lack of needed buttons.  It’s not the best phone in the world, but it is by far the best multi-purpose handheld computer and communicator.  I even think it is worth the high monthly cost.  But I can’t say for sure, because I can’t bear to look at the bill.

Recently I’ve been talking about the tools I use for interaction design and for general mac productivity.  Now I’ll cover the tools I use on the iPhone.

The first page of the home screen contains my most frequently used apps.  (Tip: press the physical home button in the home screen to get to the first page.)  On the iPhone the focus of attention is really near the bottom of the screen, so the most used ones are actually at the bottom of this list.

• iPod – (Now that I think about it, it doesn’t need to be here, since I can get to the iPod by double-pressing the Home button)
• Settings – To turn wifi off when walking around the city.  This is working around a design issue.
• App Store
• Safari
• Clock – for alarms & parking timers
• Zenbe lists – shared shopping list
• Google Maps
• Mail
• NetNewsWire – Offline RSS reading.  Syncs with my desktop RSS reader.  Outstanding!)
• Facebook (which I think of as Headline News of your friends)
• NYTimes
• Google – Amaze your friends by speaking your query
• Wikipanion – surprisingly how often we reference things in casual conversation
• Say Who – voice dialing makes up for the sluggish performance of the iPhone on my 2,400 contacts
• OmniFocus (which I’m going to demote soon because by the time it’s launched, 2.5 minutes later (!) I’ve completely forgotten what i needed to record.  I suggest you avoid this until they revamp their sync architecture and make launching instantaneous.)

In the grey bar, available on all pages of the home screen I have:

• Phone
• SMS/Text messages
• Camera
• Calendar

I sure wish I had physical buttons for accessing those items at any time, like the Palms!)

My page 2 apps include:

• Pandora – The best music app on the iPhone.  We plug it into our home sounds system and leave it on for hours.  (I have AOL Radio and FlyCast next to them for coherence, but in my experience they have been flaky or commercial-laden or both.)
• Instapaper – Click a single button on your PC’s web browser and the long article you don’t have a chance to read will be available on your iPhone, reformatted appropriately.  Great app!
• Weather
• Stocks
• Twinkle – Twitter app.  I may switch to Twittelator.  (Follow me: @feign)
• Yelp – look up restaurants and stores
• MoMuni, so I know when the bus will come by
• Stanza – eBook reading.  Excellent!  Wish I had more time to use it.  Reading prose on this small but hi-res screen really works
• My dreaded AT&T page, a Safari bookmark – so I can see if I’m going overboard in text messages, or just to feel bad
• Tip – restaurant tips
• Calculator

I have four more pages of apps I never look at.

iPhone apps are evolving faster than I can keep up.  So please tell me what absolutely must-have apps there are that I missed.

—

Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997.  His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.

These are nice clean calendars with no ads or even a copyright notice.  Very handy for planning projects and vacations, for collecting stickers, for Seinfeld’s productivity method and for manually counting the number of days until Christmas (356 as of this writing).

Download free printable 2009 calendar pdfs in 3 formats

Happy new year!

[Trivia: these nice calendars were generated in the very obsolete ClarisImpact 2.0, which I designed when I worked for Apple/Claris back around 1995.  To make them I have to use an old Powerbook that still emulates Classic mode.]

It really does take years of trial and error and filtering through dozens of products to converge on a set of tools that really work, so let me give you a push start if you haven’t thought about this topic in a while.

Favorite general productivity boost on the Mac: LaunchBar

LaunchBar is my very top recommendation for enhanced productivity on a Mac.  It lets me do umpteen most frequently tasks from the keyboard, with close to the minimum number of keystrokes possible:

• open common files and folders
• get to any bookmarked website
• initiate a search in Google or Wikipedia or Amazon or Netflix or Google Maps, etc.
• look up phone numbers
• initiate an email to someone

What is unique about LaunchBar is that it learns the abbreviations you like to use to do these things automatically, without you having to preconfigure anything.  As your habits adapt, it adapts.

I use it hundred times a day, never moving my fingers from the home row.  No Mac and no Mac user user should be without it.  It’s that good.  I wrote about LaunchBar at KPAO.

Favorite text expansion tool: Typinator

I’m very judicious when it comes to adding launch-on-boot utilities to my computer and so it was with skepticism that I tried text expansion programs after reading an article on the topic.

Text expansion is when you type something short and it’s expanded into something long.  It’s the sort of thing that you don’t see the need for until you try it.  But I gave it a shot and the more I used it, the more SSNiFs emerged:

• Expanding frequent but hard-to-type phrases.  Typing “pvo” automatically gives me “ProductVision.org”
• Correcting typos. “teh” becomes “the”.  There are many many of these pre-built into Typinator.
• Expanding boilerplate: “tbr” changes to “Thanks and best regards,”
• Date and time stamping.  I have these two adjacent keys: <;’> return the current date in this format: “12/30/08″, the opposite sequence <’;> give me this format: “081230 ” (which is great for prefixing document and folder names!)

Now I’m pretty dependent on it.  I tried a few text expansion tools and I think there are multiple quality products that could work, but I settled on Typinator.

Instant messaging client: Adium (free)

Just one free client handles all the major services.  I switch to Skype or iChat when the need to send documents, talk by voice or by video chat arises.

Favorite tool for getting things done: OmniFocus

OmniFocus puts my scattered brain on track, and helps me juggle a dozen projects.   When I have a productive day, OmniFocus usually had something to do with it.  OmniFocus is always running, so I have it auto-launch when I boot.

<whine>OmniFocus is faithful to Robert Allen’s seminal book, but a bit too faithful.  Major wishes: 1. Help me estimate time it will take to do a project  2. Help me plan my day and my week.  3. Make a usable iPhone version.  (Despite the tuning tips, it’s simply too slow to accomplish tasks like checking the list or adding something, which need to be instantaneous to be usable.  The comparison points are paper planners and the PalmPilot.)  4. Don’t require a context; 99% of what I put in OmniFocus are things I do at my computer, so Dave Allen’s contexts are not very useful to me.</whine>

Favorite handheld PIM/communicator/entertainment/information device: iPhone.

The word iPhone is a misnomer.  It would be like calling a car an iCarRadio.  The phone is just one of several things it does, and for me, only about 10% of what I use it for.  I noticed recently that over the course of a typical excursion across the city I used 8 different apps: Google Maps with GPS to get me to the appointment, email to see if a friend responded to a coffee request, SMS to confirm, Yelp to find a coffee shop, phone to finalize, NYTimes, Facebook and Wikipedia to catch up on news while I waited, photo app to grab a snapshot of my friend.  These were the scenarios we envisioned circa 2000 when I contracted with Palm, and they have now come together in a usable package.

I’ve ranted about the iPhone and criticized its inefficient UI and lack of needed buttons.  It’s not the best phone in the world, but it is by far the best multi-purpose handheld computer and communicator.  I think it is worth the high monthly cost (but I can’t say for sure, because I can’t bear to look at the bill).

Oh the most frequent apps that have bubbled up to my home page are, from top to bottom: iPod, Settings, App Store, Safari, Clock (for alarms & timers), Zenbe lists (shared shopping list), Google Maps, Mail, NetNewsWire (Offline RSS reading.  Syncs with my desktop RSS reader.  Outstanding!), Facebook (which I think of as Headline News of your friends), NYTimes, Google, Wikipanion, Say Who (voice dialing) and OmniFocus (which I’m going to demote soon because in the 2.5 minutes mine takes to launch I’ve completely forgotten what i needed to record.).  In the grey bar I have Phone, SMS, Camera and Calendar.  (Sure wish I had physical buttons for accessing those items at any time, like the Palms!)  My page 2 apps include Pandora (great!), Instapaper (great!), Weather, Stocks, Twinkle, Yelp, MoMuni (San Francisco transit), Stanza (eBook reading.  Great!), Tip and Calculator.  I have four more pages of apps I never look at.

Favorite Keyboard: GoldTouch

As I write this, my feet are up on the desk, I’m reclining comfortably with my keyboard in my lap.  (I wonder why the world hasn’t discovered that the lap is such a comfortable place to put a keyboard.)

The Goldtouch keyboard is divided into two halves that articulate around a ball joint to match the angle your wrists.  Your hands, arms and shoulders are in a natural position. If you have, had or are bound to get repetitive stress injury (RSI) you will appreciate the difference this makes.

[ GoldTouch Keyboard on Amazon ]

Macro Expander I use: iKey

Who wants to get into programming macros for productivity boost?  What a drag.  Well, if you are working 2000 hours a year for five, ten, fifteen, years, that’s 30,000 hours of working at a computer.  It’s worth taking a few of those hours to learn how to use a macro program.

I don’t think I’ve actually programmed a macro in over a year, but I use them daily without even being aware of it.

Whenever you think,  “boy, I wish all programs would standardize on one key for that operation” or “boy I do that operation 100 times a day; I wish I could just hit a command key for that function” then you have an opportunity to fix the issue yourself with a macro program.

Here are some macros I use:

• Globally assign F3, F2 and F1 to Cut, Copy and Paste.  This is a wrist saver.  You do these operations dozens or hundreds of times a day, and curling your thumb under your palm to hold down the command key and pressing V, C or X is a contortion that hurts if you do them thousands of times.
• Hide the frontmost app by pressing F6.  (Deceptively useful!)
• Get each app to agree to increase or decrease text size using the same key
• Get each app to agree to paste and match style using the same keystroke.  (Every app has this feature but they all seem to use different keys for it.)
• Disable Cmd-Q in Safari, which I would inadvertently hit when typing Cmd-W to close a tab.  That was bad because I’d lose all my tabs.  To quit I do it through the menu.
• Get each app to agree to use standard text editing keystrokes (next word, end of line, etc.)
• Copy and paste an object’s style using F5 and F4.  Super helpful.  I use this a lot in Inspiration.
• Paste a date stamp in various format.  This saves not only typing but having to look up the date.  You can also use text expander for this.

[TIP:  I prefix all my documents with the date in the format YYMMDD (for example, "081231 Mydoc.pdf").  It lets me sort reliably by the date I assign, and carries the critical meta-information of when the document was produced right there with the title.  The latest documents in a project folder are always at the bottom (or top if you prefer).  When you search for a document, the title tells you immediately whether it's a day old, a year, or five years old.  Last Created/Modified/Opened dates have never been reliable, but this is.  I've been doing this for 10 years and it's invaluable.]

I happen to use iKey for my macroriffic needs, because it worked when I needed it.  But I am glad that I don’t have to edit my macros very often, because the UI is not as easy as it could be.  I’m not going to switch now, because I have something that works, but I suggest you read some up to date reviews and see what today’s best product is.

Favorite tool to tell me how much time I have left: Pester (free)

This is another obscure but useful tool.  All it does is tell me how long I have left to work on something.  To set it up, just click the icon and say how many minutes, or what time, you need to stop.  You can set multiple events.

Pester is really useful to get things done and leave time to prepare for for the next activity.

[Design to steal: What would be better is if iCal automatically showed you in the dock icon how many minutes were left until your next appointment.  It would then be a hands-off affair.]

Favorite system monitoring tools: ActivityMonitor and MemoryStick (free)

In a perfect world you would never have to think about your computer’s status at all.  Just your work.  Apple’s out of the box experience pretends that the world is perfect, and it’s difficult to see how the machine is dealing with all those apps you have open and all the tabs you’ve got going in your browser.

But the world is not perfect, and we have to be cognizant of when we are asking our computer for too much.  Before launching that phat Adobe app, it really helps to know if you should close something else first.  And if the fan is coming on and the machine is getting sluggish, it helps to know that the CPU is sweating on some lame Flash component in a Firefox tab you opened three days ago.

The top of my dock showing Finder, LaunchBar, Typinator, Pester, Activity Monitor, MemoryStick, Dictate, OmniFocus, Adium

My dynamic duo of system monitoring tools, which I have set to open automatically on launch and which are always visible in the dock:

• Activity Monitor, set to show CPU activity in the dock. (ActivityMonitor can be found in your Application/Utilities folder.)
• MemoryStick, an obscure little utility that reflects how much RAM is available.  When the sliver of green gets too small, quit something you aren’t using or close some browser tabs to free up some memory.

MemoryStick bings at you when your system starts paging stuff out, meaning you’ve maxed out your RAM and it’s chugging along swapping memory to hard drive.  (I set mine to be consistent with the colors you see in System Monitor tab of Activity Monitor.)

The number represents the number of page files you have.  If this gets to be 6 or 8, poor you, you probably ran Windows.  Gigabytes of your hard drive is now devoted to page files.  To remedy, reboot.  (Boo!  Can this be done without rebooting?)

Favorite speech recognition:  MacSpeech Dictate (or Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows users)

[Update 9/11/09: I must put my recommendation for Dictate on hold.  The current version, v1.5.2 crashes and hangs so much as to be literally unusable.]

Speech recognition hit a threshold of usability two or three years ago with version 8 and 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Speech recognition really works, and it has been a wrist savior and productivity booster.  The bummer is, it has been a PC-only product all this time.

Because I was writing specs and a book about product vision, my need for wrist relief was great enough to find some way to make Dragon work for me and my Mac.  I hacked together a solution.  It wasn’t pretty.  (spoken word -> headset -> Mac -> Parallels Desktop -> emulated Windows XP -> Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Text output goes from Dragon -> VNC client on XP -> VNC server on the Mac -> foreground Mac app.)  Buggy, flaky, but workable when I had serious prose to churn out.  It was a pain, but less of a pain than RSI.

After years of waiting, my #1 UI wish for 2008 was granted, and the speech recognition engine for Dragon NaturallySpeaking was ported to the Mac in the form of MacSpeech Dictate.  Dictate has only the engine of NaturallySpeaking, not all the nice bells & whistles, so reviewers who knew Dragon complain about it and give it lower stars than it deserves.  It’s not perfect, but it works, and it’s hella better than my jury-rigged emulated solution.

Incidentally, my input is multi-modal.  I speak prose to the machine, and do corrections and editing with my keyboard and mouse.

When I worked at Microsoft in 1989 few of my co-workers (professional software engineers) could touch type; now most people can.  Today, few people speak to their machines, but eventually, most of us will.   Speak to a computer is not as intuitive as it sounds.  It involves training, practice, and patience, but the investment pays off, just like learning to touch-type does.

Here’s to more investment and even better speech recognition in 2009 and beyond.

[ MacSpeech Dictate at Amazon ]

—

Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997.  His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.

I’ve been designing interactive products for over twenty years, and I’m always looking for more more efficient ways to solve design problems.  Today we are fortunate to have a large set of powerful, evolved, stable products to pick from, but it can take ages to sort through them all.

So I thought it would be helpful to share what tools I have settled on for interaction design and information architecture.  Some of these you will know, some are gems you may not have heard of

[I've added some links to Amazon for related products.  If you buy anything through these links you're tossing me tip.  Thanks!]

Favorite computer: MacBook Pro

I have a 2.3 GHz, 3GB RAM model from two years ago.  Fast and stable.  I can easily go two months without rebooting.  I’ve never owned a computer this long without pining for another.  I don’t really need anything faster (although more RAM would be nice).  The computation speed of computers has caught up to the needs of a mainstream users.

The funny thing is, my MacBook Pro is actually running faster and faster due to the continued optimization of Mac OS X, and my gradual migration to Intel-native apps.  And, my prior machine, a five-year-old Powerbook is humming along contentedly in the living room as the surfing computer.  Apple treats the elderly well.

[ MacBook Pro at Amazon ]

Favorite  tool for boxes and arrow diagrams: OmniGraffle Professional

It’s so nice having the right tool for the job.  OmniGraffle Pro is the world’s best program for drawing connected diagrams: sitemaps, flowcharts, state transition diagrams, Feature -> Objective Chains (for product vision work), and so on.  Any graphics tool can draw boxes and arrows, but boxes and arrows are OmniGraffle’s mother tongue.

Many people still use Illustrator for this type of work.  The results can of course look gorgeous because of the fine level of control, but it is too painstaking and low-level for this type of work.  OmniGraffle makes making edits trivial, while offering enough fine control to make professional-looking deliverables.

I once laid out and re-engineered a complex internal workflow process with OmniGraffle.  The wallpaper-sized printout would have made Tufte proud.  The state transition diagram representing the new parallelized process was actually fun to do.

Parallelized state transition diagram made with OmniGraffle

On the PC, the best-of-class diagramming product is Visio.  But I have tipped PC people to switch to the Mac by showing them OmniGraffle.

Some people are using OmniGraffle for UI layouts.  It’s got a big community and several shared GUI widget libraries.  But I still prefer Stone Create for this work.

Omni has been courageous at inventing and re-inventing the UI to get it right.  The level of refinement and love of the product shows.  [If it could obviate Inspiration I'd be even more pleased.  See below.]

[ OmniGraffle at Amazon ]

Favorite  tool for UI design: Stone Create

Back in the day, I used to use ClarisImpact 2.0 for most of my interaction design work because it was simple & powerful.  (And, er… because I designed it when I worked at Apple/Claris.)  When Apple eventually dropped Mac Classic support in OS X, I had to find a new workhorse.  Stone Create it was.

Stone Create is a general object-based graphics program that happens to be great for designing UIs.  I use it for wireframes, specs, interaction designs, layouts, mock-ups, low-fi prototypes and scrapbooks of screenshots.

In Create, I have libraries of GUI objects for different media I design for: Windows apps, Mac apps, Web apps, mobile apps and so on.  Composing a screen is a drag and drop affair.

Text blocks are handled very smoothly.  Text boxes can be single-line, for titles that shouldn’t wrap unless you ask them to, or fixed size to fit into containers or fixed width, where you define the width and it grows vertically as needed.  This means Create knows your intent with the text block, and when you shuffle things around and resize them, they do the right thing.

Stone Create is excellent for wireframes and mockups that integrate GUI widgets and bitmaps. (click for larger view)

I can make the designs as pixel-perfect or as rough as is needed for the project.  For precise layouts, Create lets me drop in bitmaps from anywhere (screen grabs, Photoshop).  It maintains a 1:1 pixel ratio, so the results do not get distorted.  This is a  useful and rare quality!  Bitmaps and vector objects are all objects so you can directly manipulate them.  Unlike some apps whose name will go unmentioned, you don’t have to switch to the right layer.  Just grab an object and move it or resize it.

For rough wireframes and paper prototypes, I’ve been having fun using a set of sketchy GUI widgets that was inspired by an intriguing (but immature) AIR-based product called Balsamiq Mockups.  Layouts look like they were hand-drawn with a medium-width marker.  It lets everyone know implicitly that the solution they are looking at is still at the early, formative stage, and that the emphasis at this point is how well it works, not how it looks.

Create is great for generating paper prototypes.  Hand-drawn paper prototypes tend to suffer by being out of proportion.  It’s easy to draw out a page that is not viable on screen.  With Create and a good sketchy UI widget library you can get the proportions correct from the get-go.  And when you need to iterate a layout you just have to tweak what you started with; you don’t have to redraw it from scratch.

Stone Create deals with multi-page documents easily (even 30 page specs if you are into that sort of thing).  One document can contain many related designs, design alternatives and explanations.  Designs can be explained in the margins of the same document.  Other graphics apps tend to be designed around single page documents, and they don’t do multi-page docs without a struggle.  Stone Create serves as a sort of InDesign-lite, and it is fast and efficient with long documents.  Depending on the work, I will create PDF deliverables from Create or migrate the UI’s I design in Create into other apps like Google Sites.

Create supports master pages.  I might have one master page with a basic footer information, and another for a 1024-pixel-wide browser frame.

Create helps you design better because it facilitates experimentation.  I can pump out several variants of a design in a flash.  Just duplicate the page and tweak, duplicate and tweak.  Page up and page down to flip between them and compare.  Then delete the pages with dumb ideas before anyone else sees them.  It’s the envy of any designer who must keep track of which combination of layers and folders are needed for which version of the design.

The same feature lets you illustrate UI walk-throughs really easily.  Duplicate the page and tweak it to show the next state, and keep going.  Last week, I whipped up a walkthrough in 15 minutes after a whiteboard brainstorming session with a colleague.  It was convincing enough that he though it was a functioning prototype!

I also use Create as a scrapbook app.  During discovery, I’ll walk through existing UIs or those of competitors, collecting and annotating screenshots for future reference.  I can intermix these screenshots with designs as needed.

Create lets you hook up  click-through prototypes by linking objects or runs of text to other pages.  The pages can then be exported to HTML pages to run in anyone’s browser.  No native runtime client is required other than a web browser.  These quick & dirty prototypes are a viable alternative to fumbling through an actual stack of paper prototypes during early usability testing.

Create is not well-known.  And it definitely still has its quirks to get used to.  But it’s an inexpensive secret weapon for interaction design.  I’ve used it for years on dozens of projects, milking the free lifetime upgrade policy.  The developer Andrew Stone was so responsive to my feedback that we became friends, and I ended up designing a bunch of interaction design-related refinements to Create.  It’s now a joy to layout text, arrange things evenly and experiment experiment experiment.  It’s my workhorse tool for interactive product design.

[ If you order Stone Create, use my super secret Obvious Design/Create discount link for an extra $9 off. ]

Favorite tool for brainstorming, mindmapping: Inspiration

An oldie, but a goodie.  I have used Inspiration for over twelve years and consider it my second brain.

Inspiration is like an infinitely sized whiteboard. Click and type to create box there.  Command click and type to create a connected box.  Drag things around and they stay connected.  Links are always under the boxes so they don’t interfere.  Copy and paste box styles easily.  You don’t have to think about scale or pagination; the point of these diagrams is to think, not deliver something pretty.  This approach to diagramming for the purpose of thinking is simple, yet it eludes even the elite diagramming apps like OmniGraffle.

I use Inspiration to articulate issues, brainstorm alternatives and weigh the pros and cons graphically.

I use Inspiration to sort out my thoughts before I write an article, solve thick interaction design problems, lay out a work breakdown structure when planning a project.  Whenever I need to solve a problem that is bigger than my brain (i.e. most problems), Inspiration plus the largest monitor I can plug into are my friends.  Adding speech recognition makes for an even wilder party.  (see below)

Other mindmapping software creates spider diagrams, which the early thinkers of mindmapping advocated.  But to me they are an eyesore, and they miss out on the spatial value of having information clustered where you want them.

Today Inspiration marketed mostly for educational use.  But do yourself a favor and look past the farm animal graphics.

[Vision to steal: Someone, create a multi-user shared virtual whiteboard with stickies and arrows.  Then we could reach the holy grail: the benefits of collaborative sticky note processes plus the flexibility and longevity of digital storage and manipulation.]

[ Inspiration at Amazon.com ]

Favorite version of Adobe Creative Suite: CS4

That every product designer just needs Photoshop and Illustrator (and maybe Flash and Dreamweaver and InDesign) is a given.  It’s not a question of whether a designer should have the CS suite, but of which version.  CS4 is a highly regarded upgrade and it’s working for me.

Incidentally, Adobe has been trying to reposition Fireworks (which came with Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia) as a rapid prototyping tool.  I tried it, and I just don’t buy it.  The emphasis is on one page at a time, it doesn’t let you spawn five variants to experiment with, and Fireworks still feels like you are dealing with pixels rather than menus, lists, tables and labels.  I can run circles around Fireworks productivity with Stone Create.

[ Adobe CS4 at Amazon.com ]

Favorite tool for documenting designs: Google Sites

Even with agile processes, designs still must be communicated from designer to developer, and to QA and to the docs people.  Documentation is needed.  For years I sent around PDF documents with documentation.  But this year Google Sites changed how I work.

Google Sites represents a shift in the basic paradigm of how information is created and shared in a work environment, that is difficult to understand without living through.  In the old world of MS Office and Word documents, we’d labor away in our caves to create a document as near to perfect as we could get it, then solicit and incorporate feedback, and repeat.  It was slow.  Versioning was an issue.  Documents were shared haphazardly, by paper, email or on a file server available only to people on the right LAN with the right passwords.  They were islands of information that could not be linked to from other places.  Locating related prior work was nearly impossible, so wheels were reinvented.

Evolved wikis like Google Sites represent a new world.  Instead of the perfect -> publish -> iterate cycle, partial, incomplete works are available constantly, instantaneously and globally.  They are searchable and linkable so old works can be found and referenced.  Input and refinements can happen during the formative stages, not after something has reached a “publishable” state.  That’s why I like using Google Sites for specs.

I will typically have one table of contents page leading to mini-specs for each feature.  They are hyperlinked to each other as needed.  Graphics integration is pretty smooth: I can drag graphics directly from Stone Create into the image upload dialog.  Reviewers can comment on each page.  When I see a UI issue in the build I can report it in the bug database and copy and paste the text into the spec, so it is always up to date for QA and publications.  Versioning is automatic, so we don’t have to worry about losing old information (not that we ever go back to it).

The big issue with Google Sites is that you have to trust your data to Google.  An internally-hosted Wiki with Google’s level of refinement would be even better. [There are million wikis out there.  Readers, got any favorites that really work?]

Favorite text editor and note taker:  TextEdit

TextEdit has a tiny footprint, is powerful enough for note taking, and deals well with graphics.  It’s stable and fast.  The humble text editor that ships with all Macs is almost always open on my Mac with half a dozen documents in the works.

I’ve tried many note-taking and information organization apps.  (Honorable mention goes to VooDooPad.)  But plain old TextEdit documents, prefixed with the date in YYMMDD format, in the appropriate project folder in the Finder, fully searchable with Spotlight is the simple, reliable solution that I fell back on without even realizing it

And there you have my preferred tools of the interactive product design trade.  I’m always open to improved workflow, so please share your favorite solutions, and let me know if you have any questions about my recommendations.

[Update 5/26/09:  I drank the Kool Aid and am now addicted to DevonThink Pro as a general note taker and snippet database.  It's hard to get how useful and important such a tool is until you have used it.  The functionality should be built into the OS.

I am also using Scrivener to compose, organize and write long articles and the book.  Simple and wonderful.  It's what Word would have become 15 years ago, had Microsoft realized that writers need word processors to help them think.]

—

Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997.  His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.  You can follow his high signal-to-noise ratio thought stream on Twitter @dphaine.

These are not gifts or promotions or bonuses like frequent flyer miles.  These are credits you PAY FOR.  With REAL MONEY. In exchange for future imagery to download.  They just “expire” them.

iStockPhoto calls these credits their very own currency.  And they deem it okay to just take that currency from you with nothing in return.  Imagine if all those gift cards you gave and received “expired” after a year.

Sorry for sounding redundant.  I’m incredulous.

They are already benefiting from having customers prepay: they get to hold onto your money and keep the interest.

This is so obviously sleazy and unfair. Some states already have explicit laws banning the practice.

The ethics of it should be plenty to prevent a company from employing such practices, but because we care about product vision, including business models, let’s lay out why this is such a petty, short-sighted idea:

• Most companies try and incentivize customers to spend more.  Expiring credits is a disincentive for customers to prepay for bigger chunks of credits.  The more you buy, the more you have to lose.
• Most companies understand the high cost of customer acquisition and try and keep customers loyal so they don’t stray to competitors.  Unused credit is a financial incentive to return to the service.   If I had just two dollars left in my account I’d go to back to iStockPhoto and spend another $10 to get what I want.  But now that my balance is zero, I’m free to look elsewhere.  By expiring credits, iStockPhoto frees their customers who would otherwise be locked in.
• Expiring credits turns happy customers into angry customers.  Someone wrote, “Yep, iStockPhoto stole money from me as well. They got 4 dollars from me that expired a few months ago. For that, they’ve lost a customer. Genius business model. Luckily there’s lots of competition so no worries on finding clipart.”

Some homework for the business leaders of iStockPhoto: read up on net promoter.

So here is some advice for competitors: differentiate by not expiring credits, and ridicule the ethics of those who do.

Readers: what are the best alternative stock photo providers?  How did you feel when you found out your iStockPhoto credits disappeared?

Update 8/20/09 – Here are some alternative stock photo sites:

• EveryStockPhoto – searches multiple free sites
• stock.xchng – free.  Includes search results from paid sites including iStockPhoto, our nemesis
• StockXPert – paid, credits do not expire.
• PhotoXPress – free, but limited downloads per day

[Non-recommended sites that expire credits: iStockPhoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime.]

There is no immediate visual cue that lets you scan for the project folder you want; you have to click through each and see its title and what’s in it.  The problem is exacerbated with today’s huge monitors, because you can have so many more windows open at once.  Exposé kindly splays them out for examination, but it’s still work to go through them.

This is an example of when consistency can go wrong (and why consistency does not equal usability).  In this case, too much consistency among Finder windows has suppressed important information, namely what is what.

The solution is pretty clear: find a user-definable way to customize the look of a window as it appears in the Finder.  There are many possible ways to do this.  One (fairly boring) way is to let the user change the color of the striping.

In the above example, the two greenish windows are really for the same project.  (You probably did not notice this in the first screenshot.) The front most is another, and the purple one sticking out the side is another.

Readers, what other methods of distinguishing a bunch of Finder windows might work?  Change the chrome color?  Apple already lets you set background images to folders, but only in icon mode (and when is icon mode used, except for software installers?).  Might a big, scalable background image work?

One of the things I criticized was how many steps it takes just to navigate to the calendar in order to check, tweak, or add an appointment.  On the iPhone it ranges from 3 to 7 steps, with some of those being heavyweight steps that pull eyes and your attention of other things.  On the ancient PalmPilot and its newer descendants, it is one button press.  Extremely frequent task was rightfully given top-tier treatment, with a physical button on the device.

But Apple isn’t really into buttons. (Nor are they into acknowledging that the iPhone is really more of a PDA than it is a phone.)

Can we have our cake and eat it too?  Can we have direct access to key tasks while also accommodating Apple’s pathological aversion to real buttons?  Buttons that you can actually find without looking at the device, which are always available, regardless of the mode you are in, and which have the gratifying haptic feedback of… clicking?

Here’s one way: from the iPhone’s “slide to unlock” screen (or even from standby mode) let the user jump directly to an app by drawing a gesture.  C for calendar, M for mail, F for facebook.  It would be configurable.

Gestures could go deeper than just launching apps and get you to most used tasks.  Draw an A to create a new appointment.  Draw a T to go to today.  Each apps could publish its candidates for direct-access tasks, and the user could assign them to gestures.

Here’s an even better way to give immediate access to key tasks without buttons: make voice recognition the main way to get to most frequent tasks.  Press a physical “listen to me” button and say, “Go to today” or “new appointment for next Thursday at 5:30 pm” or “Call Leslie” or “new contact” or “Address book find Edwin” or “Facebook” or “Yelp nearby sushi” or “Montreal weather” or “Apple stock price”.  These were scenarios I painted several years ago.  Now they are starting to take shape at Google and with iPhone add-ons like Say Who (which actually works well) and Say Where (which doesn’t work as well yet).

A good implementation of voice command would suddenly make all that iPhone goodness a heck of a lot more efficient.  It could be a key part of an iPhone-neutralizing device.

• Product Vision Hall of Fame – catalogs some famous breakthrough products and what they did right.  These serve as role models to test our theories on how to envision great products.
• Choosing the Right Problem to Solve – talks about a key shift in thinking about product vision that turns it from something rather nebulous to something we can sink our teeth into.

Please check them out and comment with your feedback.  These writings will eventually be part of a book on product vision and I would love your help in making it great.

Now we have cameras that can go back in time to take a shot that was missed and cameras that can recognize and focus in on faces, cameras that know precisely where you are, cameras that can transmit images over the air, cameras with large, sensitive sensors that they can almost see in the dark, cameras that illuminate with heat and can see in the dark, and cameras that can record video in HD.

It seems like digital photography has reached a peak.  The quality is impeccable.  Are we done with the radical breakthroughs?

Of course not, silly!  What kind of a blog do you think this is?

There is a feature I have been looking forward to that, to my knowledge, does not yet exist in a camera.  See, with a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.

HDR image (click to enlarge)

If you have the time and inclination you could take a couple of different exposures and sew them together.  This has become known as high dynamic range imaging.

But is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button, without all the messy darkroom chemicals.

This is just one new avenue for innovation in image capture.  There are many more.  Stereoscopic point-and-clicks?  Cameras that can infer a 3D scene and automatically stitch together a 3D model?  Infrared cameras that can see in the dark?  Tiny lapel pin cameras that capture our life every few seconds?

Readers, what future digital camera innovations you foresee?