I’ve been really enjoying the roasting that Adobe’s Flash has been getting lately at the hands of Steve Jobs and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. But Gruber extended the roasting to cross-platform toolkit Qt:

Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turdthat doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app. The iPhone OS Kindle app is a native iPhone app, written in Cocoa Touch. The Mac Kindle app was produced using the cross-platform Qt toolkit.

This was followed shortly after by a Design Dare article titled Steam Is a Port — the title itself implying that Steam is a lesser app for no other reason than being a port.

Not so.

What They Got Wrong

To say that cross-platform tools are evil because one can produce bad programs with them is like saying that paint should be banned because it might fall into the hands of the tasteless. Or taggers. So too bad for Da Vinci and Picasso.

I’ve worked with wxWidgets and I’m currently working with Qt. Both libraries will let you use native controls. Like artfully used paint, both libraries will let you create native apps that will shine bright and soar.

What They Got Right

On the other hand, both Gruber and Design Dare are correct: Kindle for Mac and Steam for Mac are, indeed, ports. They were designed for one platform first, and only afterwards ported to the Mac. This rarely works, not because it’s technically impossible, but usually because the programmers are not deeply imbued with the Mac culture to get the finer details of the interface right. Often, this is compounded by bad messages from management, e.g. “who cares… we just need a Mac version to cover all bases, wrap it up ASAP”.

BTW, this is precisely why Cedrus (where I work) offers a free iPhone to all employees. It’s also why we have an iPad in the office that each employee got to take home for a week. We are not currently developing for iPhone or iPad, but if or when the time comes, using and knowing iPhone OS will be second nature.

Epilogue

The converse is also true: one can develop awful apps that don’t feel native even on Mars, all while using the platform’s native tools. Just try to buy a song or an app on iTunes. What horror.

Qt cascading style sheets, introduced in version 4.3, lets you customize each control like you won’t believe — and shoot yourself in the foot like you won’t believe either, if you’re not careful. I’m guessing that perhaps that’s how Kindle for Mac got itself in Gruber’s crosshairs. One single setting in a widget that’s high up in the hierarchy of controls can cause a button to look non-native. The uninitiated developer can then find himself trying to “recreate” that original look and never quite getting it.

I dislike non-standard controls.  We sometimes run into them because the application is cross-platform, and the developers are either too lazy to bother giving the controls a native UI, or their cross-platform tool prevents them from doing so.  That’s why I’ve never even downloaded an Adobe Air application.  Yuck.

Other times, the developer gets creative with the look of the controls, but in doing so, rarely adds enough value to make up for robbing users of their familiarity with the native look-and-feel.

One exception is the scroll bar in Tweetie, a Twitter client:

It is simple, with an ever so slight gradient.  But the best part about it is the utter lack of background.  If the information fits entirely in the window, the scroll bar disappears entirely.  Beautiful.

I had an idea regarding health care reforms.  So I went to whitehouse.gov and clicked on the Contact Us link.  As I was typing away, I realized that the reCAPTCHA words that I had to type were… “the mobsters“!

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Gotta admit, I don’t know anything about football. Our family’s sports fanatic is Robert, my brother-in-law. As I arrived at his place, my first question was “who’s playing”. Yeah, that’s how knowledgeable I am. It turns out that sometimes ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

When the score became 24-17 in the Saints favor, I told Robert that the game was over.

Robert: “No way, all the Colts need is a touchdown”.

Me: “It doesn’t look like they will score a touchdown”.

Robert: “These are the Colts, they will score a touchdown for sure, there is plenty of time left”.

Me: “Hmmm, I don’t know, they don’t like they have the fire in the belly.”

And they didn’t score. I was able to see the likely outcome precisely because of my ignorance, and hence my lack of bias.

I won’t go on and on about how bias can affect your judgement about your own designs and user interface, except to say this: be aware of it, we all have it and it can mislead.

Daniel Jalkut makes the best case yet as to why desktop applications are here to stay and why web applications, almost by definition, will always play catch up with desktop apps:

When something truly innovating and mind-blowing happens on the web, I can drop it into a WebView on my Mac and make it a part of my desktop experience. When something mind-blowing happens on the desktop, you can bet you’ll have people scurrying to painstakingly imitate it on the web.

…I imagine in 5 or 10 years the web will have caught up to something resembling how desktops behave today. But I can’t even begin to imagine what we’ll have at our fingertips on the desktop, by then. iPad?  We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Web apps have their place for sure, but desktop apps will always be the ones passing the baton to web apps. I knew this by intuition but I’m grateful to Daniel for articulating it as only he can. In the past, I have alluded to project Luceen, a new product that we’re just starting to work on. I have discussed this product with only two or three people outside the company, and the inevitable question was akin to “why are you doing it as a desktop app? don’t you see your competitors are going web-based?”

I will be giving them the link to Daniel’s post if they ask again.

Bernhard Jenny in Switzerland wrote Color Oracle, a nifty and free utility for simulating color blindness that no self-respecting programmer, UX practitioner, or web site designer should be without. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

I downloaded and tried the Mac version. It works well. When you run it, a small icon installs itself on the menu bar. To see your screen the way that a color blind person would, click on the icon and select one of three types of color blindness. Here is an example of before (left) and after:

The simulation is not continuous: once you’re seeing your screen in the eyes of a color blind person (usually male), pressing any key will return you to normal mode. But Color Oracle lets you assign a keyboard shortcut to each color blindness type, making it easy to simulate quickly. It’s a great way to get a “reality check”, in the words of Nathaniel Kelso, who helped with ideas and testing.

My first brush with what one can do for color blind persons was a 2007 post by Greg Raiz. Greg described how Apple was using red and green circles (same shape) to illustrate which stores had iPhone availability, and how they later switched to using different shapes (snapshot used with permission):

For a company that cares deeply about user experience, one would expect Apple to provide a similar utility to its developers, preferably with continuous simulation instead of snapshots. But until then, Color Oracle is a great addition to our toolbox.

This is a post about writing.

See, after I read Rands’ review of OmmWriter, I sceptically downloaded the program. I ran it. And…

And I took a deep breath. No, not the kind of deep breath you take before your first bungee jump. Or the kind you take when you’re just about to run from the bulls in Pamplona (I’m assuming — not that I would know).

Imagine being surrounded by noise, lots of noise, with one task thrown at you after the other, and you’re struggling to keep up, you feel like you’re on an accelerating threadmail, and then suddenly… Very suddenly. It all stops. It feels great, and you take a deep breath. That kind of deep breath.

OmmWriter is a well thought out minimalist writing tool. It hides everything else on your desktop. You get a calming, Zen-like background to type on, accompanied by equally calming music. And little else.

You start typing. When you move the mouse, a few options appear. Resume typing and all options get out of your way. Simple.

OmmWriter saves its files as plain old text files, so there is no support for bold or italics. It’s fine by me. Spell checking while you type is available and is equally well thought out: misspelled words turn gray instead of the more familiar and more disruptive red underline. Nice touch. Surprisingly though, spell checking is not enabled by default.

The only complaint that I have about OmmWriter is the use of an underline cursor instead of the standard i-beam. In my experience, underline cursors work best with monospaced fonts such as Courier. In the following screen snapshot, it’s hard to tell whether the cursor is under the letter ‘i’ or the letter ‘n’, and I often find myself deleting the wrong letter:

The program is still in beta testing. I wish that the release version 1.0 will add a Find feature and support for smart quotes.

OmmWriter is not the first program to try this minimalist approach but I find it the best. I eagerly downloaded and tried WriteRoom when it first came out but was disappointed. WriteRoom bills itself as “distraction free writing software”; the right idea but off-the-mark implementation.

Google has quietly updated its home page, it is now cleaner than ever:

It remains clean if you type your search query and press Enter. Other items fade in quickly if you move the mouse inside the browser window.

This works on all browsers that I tried except Internet Explorer 6 (it works on IE8, I don’t have IE7). Note also the aggressive push for Chrome. The message “A better way to browse the web / Install Google Chrome” appears on all browsers except Firefox for Windows — it does show in Firefox for Mac. Bug or feature?

I’ve always liked the iPhone’s Stocks app, even in version 1.0. In addition to the eye candy, the app showed out of the box thinking. Most other charts have the axis labels neatly rounded, e.g. if the price range is between 11 and 29, the Y axis labels would be 10, 20, and 30.

But someone forgot to tell the iPhone developers. Instead, the Y axis on the Stocks app shows the low and high for the stock or index, thus conveying very useful information on a diminutive screen. In the chart on the right, you can tell right away that the low and high for the index are 4683 and 5050.

Recently, I was further impressed with how the app handled an interruption in data feed:

Compare the above with how Yahoo! Finance handled the interruption in data feed on the same day:

When we moved from Phoenix to San Pedro several years ago, I reminded my wife all the time how my commute became longer, all of 2 miles instead of 1.5.

We moved again a couple of months ago and my commute is now a whopping 11 miles, driving under blue skies on a scenic coastal road, with the view alternating between Catalina island, beautiful beaches and imposing cliffs, often watching the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean.

It’s horrible!

Or is it? I never thought I’d say this, but I am now liking my commute. It all started when I plugged my iPhone to the car’s stereo. After a few days of listening to music, I switched to the WNYC’s Radiolab podcasts and have been enjoying them thoroughly. I just finished listening to Placebo, their best so far. In another podcast, I was pleasantly surprised that a guest speaker was one of our own SuperLab customers, Dr. Julian Keenan.

Then there are those days when I don’t feel like listening to anything. I enjoy that as well. It’s the pause that refreshes.

Commuting is not so bad after all.