The Appening

In which our Hero is amazed at how many questions he got about software

So going back to the bucket of questions because my sketchbook doesn’t fit in my pocket which means I can’t work on turning my conceptual monkey into a realized drawing….

[Arbi] asks: “Is it possible to write an app. that throws up random suggestions for diary entries?”

Absolutely. In fact, that’s very possibly simple enough that I ought to try just for the sake of the experience. Unfortunately, my brain being my brain, it immediately leaps up with “Improvements.” Which is actually a bit of a problem for a developer because it creates a moving target, which means I never finish. Which is the biggest reason why I never work on my own OD replacement, as increasingly tempting as that idea gets.

(The other problem is that it immediately justifies me going out and getting a Windows Phone and a Blackberry to get some experience developing for that. And, equally ironically, it completely fails to motivate me to get an iPhone.)

So let me ask what would you want from a topic suggestimicator, Gentle Reader?

From [.ODCreek], I had XP then bought this laptop which is Win 8 with a push button option for Win 7. I know nothing of either and am going bonkers making the transition.

I say this with all the solemnity that David Tennant has ever brought to these words: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

The transition from Windows XP to Windows 7 is a little jarring, but as I mentioned to a colleague after my own migration, you don’t see how much better it is until you have to go back to XP and then you struggle because 7 is so much better organized and functional. I think Windows 7 is a superb operating system in many respects, even if I’d rather be using Linux on the whole.

Windows 8, on the other hand, is a horrifying expression of how product design can fail. Here’s the thing, technically, in a very specific way, Windows 8 is a stunning achievement. There are performance and design choices all over the place that truly make this a massively powerful operating system. But then came the the overreach.

See, Microsoft knows that if it can crack the tablet space, the ipad space, with a full-scale windows platform, they’ll kick Apple in the dangly bits. Because the iPad is brilliant, but the Windows application space is massive on a scale that even the iPad will take a long time to catch. There are lots of good office-like apps, but there’s only one Office, and love it or hate it, you need it to be able to work with most business contexts. And however clever the “lite” versions of the picture editors are, even photoshop’s own ipad app, if you can give people photoshop on a tablet, they’re going to rub their greedy hands and jump.

So Microsoft has been trying, and trying. XP had a tablet edition and so does Windows 7, but windows tablet never caught on because a) windows is built for a 1-pixel fine mouse pointer and not a 32×32 finger and b) because Windows is built for a thirstier CPU than the other phones and tablets.

Microsoft is very much aware of both problems, and they jumped to address them. First, they took their phone OS and overlayed it into Windows. So now you get a cool touch screen that looks fabulous on tablets. Second, they created a version of Windows that works on the sippier ARM Processors. And this is where it all went wrong.

They were so intent on filling the tablet role that they didn’t spend enough time integrating how that works with the rest of windows. As a result, Windows 8 has multiple personalities. You start in tablet mode, and then bounce to desktop mode, but never the twain shall meet. So if you open “tablet mode” IE to browse the web and then switch to desktop mode, you’ve lost that context, and the IE you open will be a new session that knows nothing about what you’d been up to.

It’s horrifying. I don’t know how anybody in their user experience group could have passed it except as a last-resort. The idea is nice, and I’ll even accept that sometimes you want your computer to handle multiple separate contexts, but this is weird and uninstinctive. Equally they ravaged the desktop mode to try to make it feel more mated to the tablet mode, but again, it’s a haphazard and inconsistent thing.

Add to that the new version of Windows that runs on low powered processors is actually not Windows. Yeah, this is a fun one. Windows 8 RT is marketed as Windows, but you can’t run any of the programs you already have because they have to be rewritten for the new environment. But you don’t see that anywhere in their marketing. It’s all Windows. Till you run it and discover it doesn’t run Office either, and you could have had a nice iPad instead.

Long winded, but I worry about how much it will discourage people who were comfortable with their old computers, and I really want them to know that this isn’t their fault. It really is a mess, truly, madly, deeply.

So, to .ODCreek, if you have the option to run Windows 7, I would just stay there, because it’s a much more coherent experience and one that will make a lot more sense to you as an XP veteran.

And to the world, I say, avoid Windows 8 if you can. In a year or so they’ll be releasing Windows 8.1 which will represent what they learned from this debacle, and indications are that it will be a significant step towards being a smidge less confusing. At the very least the schizoid aspect should be reduced.

[firebabe] asked: What kind of app would you create?

App 1:

I text now. I do, because it’s a highly convenient way of reaching the very few people I need to reach with surgical precision. So I use it. And I’m glad for the mechanism to communicate.

But I loathe it in general. There’s no way to assess priority, there’s just alert after alert and they’re all urgent and there’s no way to say, “Hey, okay, I get it, maybe don’t buzz every single message that comes in, at least till AFTER the screens had time to blank.”

So what I’d like is to write is a smarter communication system. I’d like the internet of text messages. I want my devices to be smart enough to find me, to use the cheapest protocol, I want pictures to work over the internet. I’d like whatsapp, but from a provider I actually trust not to spy on me, and supported at a level that makes it work automatically with people who have whatsapp and that makes it bridge to the other clones.

Except getting everybody to *use* it is way harder than useful. And if not everybody, then it’s just another app that’s out there being annoying in the face of bigger players working the landscape.

App 2:

I wrote a little mental math drill game for android. It’s simple, it’s functional, it won me a free tablet from Blackberry, and best of all, it says “Hi” when I start it which makes me inexplicably happy.

Then friends asked to try it and as a result, I’ve got suggestions to make it easier to understand, and I’ve got some changes to make because now I that I’ve done it once, I know some things not to do. So I want to rewrite it to make it a little less user-hostile.

App 3:

I’d like a loop soundy interface thingy. I don’t know what the musical doodad is actually called, but I’ve seen them, and I’ve got some bad ones on my android phone. I’d really enjoy creating a good one.

App 4:

Oh wait, I can’t talk about that one, that actually has economic value. 😉

App 5:

That topic suggesterer actually sounds interesting, Arbi. May have to dabble about that one.