Overhaul iTunes

Posted on by

I just want to voice another one of my minor but long-lasting annoyances: iTunes doesn’t make any sense. It’s “iTunes”, but “tunes” are hardly the focus anymore. It’s a music player and a video library. It’s a store to buy those things, and also a failed social-networking site. It’s a media sharing/broadcasting application which allows you to push media around your house. It’s the “App Store” for iPhones and iPads and iPods, but not for Mac software– for some reason, that has its own store and its own application.

iTunes also serves as the syncing application for all of these things, keeping your music and apps and video on your iPod in sync with your computer. In my mind, it really crossed the line when it started being used to transfer documents between your computer and your iOS devices– so in addition to everything else, iTunes is also a file manager. Still, as much as iTunes does, my Mac still needs to launch iPhoto in order to sync pictures with my iPhone..?

Along with everything else, this isn’t very Apple-like. The branding is unfocused, and the application itself is overly complex. Apple tends to favor applications that do one single thing simply instead of having a huge application that does everything.

So here’s the solution: Break iTunes into 3 different applications. The first application should be Apple’s new online store. They should consolidate the Mac App store with the iOS app store, and pair it with their online media offerings. The second application can be the media player, which is what iTunes was originally designed to do. The third application should be focussed entirely on maintaining and syncing your iOS devices.

Google+ so far

Posted on by

I’ve been trying out Google+, and overall I think I like it better than Facebook. It has the feeling of something more robust with more potential. Or maybe it feels more professional somehow. Of course, I don’t really use Facebook for much, and I still don’t know how people are really spending their time there. If Farmville is your thing, maybe Google+ will be a huge step down.

One of the nice features is that Google+ lets you create “circles”, which are groups that you can put your social networking contacts into. Google provides you with a default set of circles, including “Acquaintances” and “Family”, but you can create your own to group people however you’d like. Facebook also lets you group friends, but Google+ seems to make the groupings more clear and easier to manage. Google has also made it easier to control which circles of friends can see what information, which has always been one of my complaints about Facebook– I’d like to be able to post something rude to my friends without my Mom seeing it, and I’d like to be able to gripe about work without my colleagues seeing it.

I wonder if it wouldn’t also be useful to allow users to create different categories of posts which act as different feeds. Whereas circles make it easy for you to control what people are allowed to see, creating different feeds might enable your friends/followers to decide what they want to see. For example, I could have my actual status updates (e.g. “going to the beach today!”) separate from my attempts to analyze the tech industry. Maybe some of my friends are interested in one set of updates, but not the other.

On the other hand, I am also concerned that too much control could complicate the interaction too much, and worse, it could eliminate happy accidents. I’ve seen great responses on Facebook from unexpected sources; some of my favorite responses to my own posts have come from people to whom the posts were not directed.

On a side note, it also strikes me that Google has a number of semi-overlapping services. I’ve been complaining for a while about the fragmentation of digital communications: Not only am I checking several different email addresses, but I have 3 phone numbers that might get SMS messages, 4 IM accounts that I use, and a couple social networking accounts. Those are a lot of different places to check for messages.

Will we finally see Google integrating Google+, Gmail, Buzz, Blogger, Google Voice, Google Talk, Google Groups, and Picasa into a single coherent platform?

Shirky/Pink in WIRED

Posted on by

Ok, so apparently I’m not the only one to connect Clay Shirky’s recent talk about “cognitive surplus” with Dan Pink.  Wired had an article a while back where the two converse about motivation and collaboration.  It’s a pretty good read (though suffers a strange overly-polished tone), but it won’t hold any revelations if you’ve watched the two TED talks I just posted.

There is one aspect of this that bothers me, though.  Early on in the dialog, Shirky says that if we, “… start thinking of [our free time] as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource.”  Of course he’s right.  It’s a wonderful new resource that is already being harnessed.  As they mention, this “cognitive surplus” is being used to create serious open source projects like Linux and Apache, great resources like the Wikipedia, and even all the dumb Youtube movies and LOLcats you could ever want to see.

Still, I’m wary of thinking of our free time as a “resource” for achieving new levels of productivity.  Shirky says of free time:

People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world.  But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.

This observation wouldn’t bother me at all if Shirky were bemoaning the loss of tight-knit communities and face-to-face interaction, but instead he seems to be advocating converting all of that television-watching time Wikipedia-editing time.  There’s something disturbing in this.

Does this mean that, when we’re done with a full day’s work, we’re supposed to come home and ignore our communities while working for several more hours, this time for free?  Is it too much to expect a few hours of rest and socializing?

In fairness, I haven’t yet read either of their books, so I don’t know if they address this problem better.  Still, I think this is connected to the niggling question I was trying to put together in my last post: Shirky seems eager to exploit the resource of free-time, but doesn’t seem to ask the question, what does this mean for our work-time?

Our society tends to take for granted that we must all suffer the sometimes absurd effects of economic inequality, and we accept this because using money as a motivator is the only way to create a productive society.  Shirky and Pink argue that money is often a terrible motivator and can actually have adverse effects on productivity, and then they continue on as though they haven’t noticed that they may have knocked out our society’s underpinnings.

Here’s my parting thought: Clay Shirky presents Ushahidi.com as a triumph of “cognitive surplus” because it was made by developers in their spare time.  Might it instead be a shortcoming of our economic system that these developers were forced to do such important work in their spare time?

(Sorry if this is muddled, but this is a product of my cognitive surplus, and not of my work life– i.e. I’m tired.)

Edit: I suppose I’m not arguing with anything Pink/Shirky are explicitly saying.  I’m worried that people might be looking at these discoveries about human motivation and thinking, “This is great!  You mean, not only can we get people to work their normal crappy 9-to-5 job, but we can use new motivational tricks to get them to go home and keep working for free.  Now, if we could only keep people from sleeping, people could work 24 hours a day!”

To me, the story shouldn’t be “people will work for free” but instead “coercing people to work under threat of homelessness and starvation might not be necessary.”

Work/Reward

Posted on by

Clay Shirky has made yet another interesting and hopeful TED talk.  I’m not going to rehash the things he talks about, but instead jump straight to the niggling half-formed question that I can’t quite shake: what happens if the most beneficial and important things we will do are not things we’re financially compensated for?

Admittedly, that doesn’t immediately sound like a bad thing.  People are doing important work for free, out of love for the work or out of concern for the consequences of that work, and we all benefit.  However, I always thought that the purpose of our economic system was to support and reward useful contributions to society.  There are certainly people out there who will claim that, for any useful endeavor, there must be a business model capable of supporting that endeavor.  You’ll hear an argument like, “If there is enough demand that people are willing to pay the required price, then a business can flourish.  If there is not enough demand for a product or service, then it must not be worth providing.”  But that’s not true, is it?

With all the things the poor need, there’s plenty of demand; there just isn’t any money to meet the need.  Further, there might be projects or even whole industries that are impossible to turn into conventional businesses that must be run at a profit (or even required to break even).  Setting aside the example of open source software for a second, you have more conventional businesses like the record and movie industries, which cannot exist without government protection of copyright.  Even more concrete, you have the building and maintenance of vital infrastructure, which must be run “at a loss” even though the benefits to society often outweigh the costs.  There are, of course, many charitable organizations who solicit donations, and even software that’s funded through donation.

So if the purpose of our economic system was to support and reward useful contributions, what does it say about our economic system when so many useful contributions are not supported by it?  There have always been great contributions to society that have gone unrewarded.  That isn’t new.  There have been influential artists and writers and scientists and great thinkers who have died in poverty.  But I wonder, what if the balance shifts, and more of our contributions are collaborative and can’t be monetized?  Would we then need to change the way we think about money?

Sometimes these thoughts seem like far-fetched naive idealism, but as Shirky points out, the realities of financial penalties and rewards don’t actually work the way we expect.  His example of the day care instituting a fine is by no means the only example.  Dan Pink gave another TED talk on the topic, explaining how incentives do not necessarily improve performance.

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to propose.  These ideas puzzle me, and I’m not really even convinced that this is a new problem.  The economics of online collaboration and open source software start to make the problem more obvious, since there arises a natural conflict between open source and closed source competitors.  However, I wonder if it may be that our economic systems never worked as well as we imagined.  Can we structure our economy so that we support all of the work that needs to be done?

Posted on by

Perhaps our brains weren’t designed for developing an understanding of the universe any more than our fingers were designed for typing on a keyboard.

Posted on by

I wonder sometimes whether it matters what i believe, aside from how it affects what i say and do. But are the things I say and do determined by my beliefs, or are my beliefs determined by the things I say and do?

Posted on by

No narrative captures the entire story.

I’m not a fan of the narrative that we’re all vivid and passionate wild things who should hope to burn out brightly, expressing individuality and energy.

I’d prefer a narrative that included some hope of dignity; that restraint, too, can be natural; that rebellion and raucousness lose their charm; that goodness might be more important than beauty.

That all of this matters.

Posted on by

Each life is a tragedy, eventually ending in downfall and unfulfilled dreams. Fortunately, each life is also a comedy, culminating in hundreds of happy endings, temporary as they are.

I’d like to keep reminding myself that these are not different lives.

“Limited government”

Posted on by

I’m tired hearing about how the government shouldn’t get involved in medicine, public transportation, or telecommunications because “if the founding fathers wanted the government to be involved, they would have put it in the Constitution.”

Of course it’s not in the Constitution.  None of it existed yet. There was no Internet or telephones 200 years ago, nor were there trains or cars. Medicine hadn’t really even been invented yet. Yes, there were doctors, but the doctors of their time advised that people avoid bathing and use leeches. Not only were there no CAT scans or MRIs or antibiotics back then, there weren’t even stethoscopes or medical thermometers.

And let’s not forget, the Constitution also doesn’t give the government any particular power to form agencies like the FBI or CIA. It gives the government the power to have an army and navy, but doesn’t explicitly authorize them to create the Air Force.  It doesn’t give them specific powers to fund military research and keep a stockpile of nuclear weapons.  I don’t remember there being any particular clause that permits the government special powers to provide for disaster relief or combat terrorism.

The founding fathers weren’t afraid of communism. Communism also hadn’t been invented yet. It’s arguable that capitalism didn’t really exist yet either; it certainly didn’t exist in its modern form. The limits that the Constitution put on the government were to prevent the rise of a tyrant, not to prevent the government from providing medical checkups for poor children.

iPad Missed Opportunities Part 3: Dashboard home screen

Posted on by

I think I’ll probably get an iPad and, in the long run, I’ll probably think it’s a very well designed device.  However, my first impression when I saw a picture of the iPad was, “Well that’s a goofy home screen.”  Take a look:

Now it’s not too bad.  It’s clean and simple and no-nonsense.  The icons are all far apart, I suppose to keep you from accidentally hitting the wrong thing, and maybe when I get my hands on an iPad I’ll be glad things are spaced so far apart.  But my first impression was that it was a big waste of space.  Also, there’s very little information here; the only think I know from looking at this screen is that I have some unread email, but I have no idea from who or regarding what.

What I had anticipated and hoped for when I heard rumor of the iPad would be that it would give you something a little more useful and information-dense.  I was hoping that the primary home screen would be a sort of dashboard with a whole lot of information available at a glance.  Here’s a mockup just to give an idea:

Now admittedly I’m not an interface designer or even a graphic designer, but the big idea here is to present the user with an aggregated feed of information from several sources.  You have a consolidated inbox of all email accounts, but also the most recent SMS messages, IM conversations, voicemail transcriptions, and even incoming social networking notifications.  Below that, you have news feeds to let you know what’s going on in the world.  There’s a search box that would search all the information on your device, a box that gives you time, date, and the weather, and below that a box that shows a list of contacts in your address book, including the contacts’ IM status.  At the very bottom, a series of shortcuts to the user’s favorite applications.  All in one screen, right there without needing to flip back and forth between applications.

At the risk of overstating things, I think it’s important to note that this isn’t just a different design, but I think it’s actually a different conceptual approach to the interface.  Apple has had a long history of object-oriented user interfaces.  Apple was one of the early developers to use the desktop metaphor, and Mac OS retained a spacial file manager for all the way until OSX.  Even OSX’s Finder exhibits spacial behavior if you hide the toolbar and sidebar.  Apple seems to be sticking with their conventional interface concepts, so it makes sense that the first screen you see is essentially a bunch of little objects– little buttons to press on, and those buttons do things.

Twenty years ago, interfaces pretty much needed to be object oriented and spacial in order for people to make sense of them, but I think people today are ready for interfaces that are a little more abstract.  I propose that it’s time to put the information front and center.  Although I’m generally a fan of Apple’s products, I was impressed to see Microsoft’s new OS for phones.  Instead of filling the interface with icons and fancy jelly-bean buttons, it’s all minimalist white text on a black background.  I don’t know if the UI will be intuitive and pleasant to use, but it looks pretty slick.

Just to be clear, I haven’t presented this interface mockup to propose it as an idea interface.  Interface design is pretty complicated, and I’m sure Apple could come up with something much better.  Still, I’d like to argue that information-driven interfaces could be more efficient than more classic object-oriented approaches. The mockup is just a visual aid.