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.

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.

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.

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?

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:

I thought that Firefox was the only Mac app to still provide its own dictionary instead of taking advantage of the Mac’s built-in one, but I found a worse app this week: it neither uses the built-in one nor provides its own. The developers suggest that you “Take the time to copy edit your work so that you can avoid embarrassing typos…”:

In essence, you need to type your text in another app, then copy and paste it. And not just to have your work spell-checked: this app’s edit field is not resizable — a very un-Mac experience. You don’t have to type long before it becomes a chore.

Yes, you probably realized it by now: the guilty app is Apple’s own iTunes. iTunes has always had two faces. The nice, Mac-like one is fast and feels, well, like a Mac. The bad face is the iTunes store part of the program that’s built using WebKit. But this hardly excuses iTunes: Safari too uses WebKit but feels a lot zippier, and yes, supports the built-in dictionary.

The icons provide nice visual clues but without adding color and other distracting elements like a badge. In other words, just about right. See the full article here.

“Simply click and hold on the grabbable area of any floating (non-maximized) window and shake your hand left and right vigorously. When you do so the first time, all other open windows are minimized. Repeat the action, and those minimized windows will be restored to their prior state.”

Nice. What’s more, Paul provides a link to a utility that makes the feature available on Windows XP and Vista.

Size Does Matter

The icon changes in particular caught my attention. But where young Sebastiaan sees “all sorts of nice UI changes and icons”, this middle aged man sees (no pun intended) a welcome relief to my eyes: the icon dimensions are bigger, and the icons themselves are larger within the frame. Here are four examples:

The new ones are on the bottom row. Notice how the Skip icon fills more of the available area. In the new Comment icon, I can now actually see the X close icon. And in the new Bigger and Smaller icons, the up and down triangles are much easier on the eye.

I am happy that Apple is paying attention to its older customers. They are everywhere. While at Macworld Expo this week, I noticed how many participants were middle age and older folks, and not just attendees — even programmers.

Another reason to applaud this revamping of icons is the higher density of displays. While the previous icons looked good on the 1200 x 1920 pixels of a 24″ monitor, they looked tiny on the same 1200 x 1920 pixels of a 17″ MacBook Pro with a high density display.

Not Just iWork

These changes are not limited to iWork. The following two screen snapshots are from Apple’s Texas Hold’em game for iPhone, versions 1.0 and 1.1 respectively. In 1.1, the cards are vastly more readable.

Prepare For The Future

Apple has made it clear that it is seeking resolution independence on its displays. I will not be surprised the least bit to find out that, once resolution independence is fully implemented in software, the company will start manufacturing displays of higher and higher density. Inappropriately designed icons will start looing smaller and smaller.

Why?

It’s simple, really. With all due to respect to Samsung’s Instinct and other iPhone wannabe recent offerings, the iPhone currently has no competition. Despite some bugs, the gap between it and the next closest competitor is so vast, it’s not even funny. Garmin’s Nuviphone and phones based on Google’s Android platform look promising. But until they ship, iPhone rules.

With Cedrus’ sharpened focus on design, does it make sense for our employees to use crapware? Hardly. No university teaches programming using pen and paper — you’ve got to cut your teeth on a real computer. Even something as basic as tying your shoes can’t be learned by listening to someone telling you how it’s done. You need to practice.

The same goes for design. You cannot develop a sharp sense of design unless you are using the absolute best examples of good design. Crapware, or even second best, will not cut it.

No Tolerance

And the last reason to offer free iPhones is this: the best developers and the best employees are those who have little tolerance for poorly designed stuff, software included. They didn’t know it at the time (they will now!), but that was one of the primary reasons why I switched the company from Windows back to Mac OS two years ago.

It is well known that Mac users expect better designed programs from developers. Mac developers will get lambasted for minor sins that their Windows counterparts regularly get away with. The same logic applies to iPhone users: the level of expectations is high and tolerance for poorly designed mobile apps is very, very low. If you don’t believe me, just see what happened to Stevens Creek Software when they ported their TripLog/1040 app from Palm OS to iPhone.

It’s a Computing Platform

If you have Windows developers who have never used a Mac, would you ask them to start developing a Mac application overnight? Even if, hypothetically, they come up to speed on Xcode, Interface Builder, and other Mc OS tools in an instant, they will still not be able to develop a great app because they have not previously been immersed in Macs and Mac OS culture.

With the release of the iPhone SDK and App Store, iPhone is set to become much more than a mere talking tool. It’s an emerging computing platform that will compete with handheld game devices and open new opportunities. When the day comes when Cedrus needs to develop an iPhone app, our developers must be already immersed in the iPhone culture. It takes time to “get it”.

Not Just for Developers

And last but not least, everyone at Cedrus gets a free iPhone instead of just developers, for two reasons. First, to avoid creating two classes of employees. Everyone’s contribution is important. The developers write code. But without the non-developers, we might as well pack and go home.

And second, being a small company everyone’s opinion is solicited on planned UI designs. The non-developers provide a different and very valuable point of view and will often pinpoint design problems that a developer would miss. Ignore the non-developers at your company at your own risk!