Apple to rethink scrolling and mice?

Two of Apple's hardware patent filings have made the news this Friday.

The first, discovered by AppleInsider, describes a new Mighty Mouse design that ditches the problematic scroll ball, and lets the user switch between a "traditional" (cursor control) mode and a "pan/scroll" mode by adjusting the position of the fingers holding the mouse. In the latter mode, mouse movement would translate into scrolling, and the pointer would not move.

It may sound like a nice idea at first, but it has some serious problems. First of all, while the current two hand positions that let users choose between "right" and "left" clicking are fine by me, apparently some users find it confusing. I'm not sure if introducing yet other hand positions for switching between yet other modes is a good idea.

The "scrolling mode" itself also leaves me scratching my head. It's nothing new: many traditional scroll-wheel mice have such a mode which you can enter and exit by pressing the scroll wheel. I use such a mouse at work, and I hardly ever use that feature.

Modes are bad. I've been conditioned all my life to using the mouse to point; now I'd be supposed to use the same motion for scrolling. To me, the concept of moving the mouse for anything other than moving the pointer is totally alien. It's like using the steering wheel to shift gears.

When I scroll, I expect to have my mouse remain stationary. And I don't want to readjust my hand position every time I want to scroll. So thanks, but no thanks.

I think all Apple needs to do is, really, just fix the damn scroll ball, so that it works and keeps working. Perhaps a new design should avoid the use of moving parts. But how would that be possible?

One idea that Apple was toying with (and filed a patent for) was the rotary wheel mouse, which would have featured an iPod-like wheel on top of a mouse. The patent application itself starts by dissing traditional scroll wheels in order to establish the superiority of the proposed solution. Ironically, its arguments also stand valid against the scroll ball solution Apple eventually adopted:

the user must scroll, pick up a finger, scroll, pick up a finger, etc. This takes time and can be an annoyance to a user. In addition, because a portion of the wheel protrudes above the top surface of the mouse, inadvertent or accidental scrolling may occur when one of the two buttons is activated.

The rotary wheel would have allowed lengthy, continuous scrolling, without lifting a finger. Note how neither the Mighty Mouse nor the new "dual-mode" mouse can do that.

So what was wrong with the rotary mouse? Simple: it would let you scroll either only vertically or only horizontally, just like traditional scroll wheel mice. This is probably why the idea was ditched, and the omnidirectional scroll ball emerged as a solution. At least for the time being.

Incidentally, this is why I don't think today's other hardware patent filing, the one about yet another iPod-esque rotary wheel put on a keyboard, is going to go anywhere.

I think rotary wheels are on their way out anyway. Looks like the iPhone won't have one, not even a touch-screen implementation featured in yet another patent filing. And I think it's a safe bet that the iPhone's interface will eventually, over the next three or four years, trickle down all the way to the iPod nano.

So, I think Apple should go back to the drawing board if it wants to dump the scroll ball. I have some suggestions, and I'll post them soon. Stay tuned!

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Is the desktop dead? You wish!

Paul Graham says Microsoft's dead. I think his statement is a bit premature, but in essence, right: while still hugely profitable, Microsoft has become yet another big dumb company that matters less and less. The once fearful software dinosaur keeps (admittedly) playing catch-up to Apple's software innovations, and just about every new endeavor it attempts ends up as a humiliating failure.

But according to Graham, the main reason behind Microsoft's demise is... the death of the desktop. Ouch.

Everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

He links to Snipshot, a web application with basic image editing capabilities to prove the Photoshop point.

While impressive and useful in some circumstances, I'd be hard-pressed to find that app anything more than a novelty today.

So is Graham a Photoshop power user? Here's his background:

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He's currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.

OK. I'm a bit tired of visionaries and web programmers pronouncing the desktop dead.

I'm a bit sick of platform-independent enthusiasts, including subcontractors I've worked with throughout my career, dismissing very legitimate usability and performance concerns. If the work you do involves several files, complex and quick actions, and a thousand clicks per hour, nothing comes close to a dedicated desktop application.

So let's talk again when someone develops a web-based version of, say, iLife. And yes, it does need to include optimized scrolling and full-screen slideshows in iPhoto, recording in iMovie, DVD encoding and burning in iDVD, and all the rich user interface features such as Exposé, multiple windows, drag and drop, immediate feedback, and acceptable performance. It might be possible in five years, but honestly, would it be worth the hassle?

Remember how television was supposed to kill the cinema? The desktop isn't going anywhere either.

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Why the iPhone is a safe bet for Apple

Does Apple run a huge risk with the iPhone? It has been pointed out several times just how competitive the cellphone market is, how unfamiliar Apple is with the sector, and how hard it may be for the company to succeed.

It might appear that Apple has sunk tremendous R&D costs into developing the iPhone: it's truly a revolutionary product, with hundreds of patents and breakthrough features. In creating the iPhone, Apple even ported OS X to a different processor, and shoehorned it into a tiny handheld device! And unlike the clumsy mobile version of Windows (whose name is seemingly changed more frequently than Steve Ballmer's underwear), the iPhone OS actually seems like a product that has actually been adapted to the needs of its users.

What if the iPhone fails? Will Apple just write off all the time and money it invested into it? Will all that great technology be thrown out, and will the company sulk back to manufacturing Macs and iPods?

No. First of all, I think the iPhone is very unlikely to fail. I think people want it badly. They can hardly wait to get one. The momentum that has been building up behind the iPhone should be strong enough to guarantee exceptional sales.

But even if initial reaction proves to be less than stellar, Apple can pretty much still fix the product in software: it can add killer features, it can open it up as a development platform, and so on. The possibilities are endless, especially in light of the Cocoa frameworks that enable rapid software development.

But let's imagine the worst-case scenario, a Cube-style disaster. Let's imagine that the iPhone sells so badly that Apple needs to discontinue it. Then what?

Here's what would happen then. Apple's stock would tank. Paul Thurott, Rob Enderle, and that other idiot whose name I forget would celebrate by tap dancing and farting.

And about three seconds later, Apple would release a new generation of the iPod that would make everyone's jaw drop.

It would be the iPhone without the phone. It would play widescreen movies. It would use multi-touch. It would have your photo library on it. You could take notes with it. It would still be a PDA. It would have WiFi, it would have Safari, it would have Google Earth, it would have Skype.

It would do things that AT&T/Cingular would never let the iPhone do. It would have dozens of gigabytes of flash memory. And it would sell below $400.

And this thing would sell like nothing has sold ever before.

How do I know?

Easy. That's because such an iPod is coming anyway. Can you imagine this not happening? Will the iPod forever have a screen the size of a keyhole? Starting June, if you want the best iPod Apple has made, you will have to buy the iPhone. That's yet another way Apple wants to help the sales of the phone. But obviously, that will change eventually: shouldn't the iPod be the best iPod ever made? How long can it afford to be out-iPodded by another product?!

Obviously, Apple's releasing a higher-end product first. If it created a widescreen iPod before the iPhone, the latter would sell worse. So the new iPod will have to wait. How long it will have to wait depends largely on the success of the iPhone, I think.

But I'm convinced that the new, "iPhone without a phone" iPod is already ready, and mass production could start any moment a certain red phone rings.

And of course, now that OS X has been ported to a tiny device, Apple will never be the same company again.

And it's not an isolated phenomenon, either. Apple TV has turned out to be a stripped-down Mac, running Mac OS X, performing a dedicated function. For $300. Am I the only one who thinks that the implications of this are huge?

Apple is taking computing into completely new places. It's porting OS X left, right and center. Who knows what products Apple has in the pipeline?

The iPhone is just a beginning. Sure, it's important for Apple that it succeed. Yet even in the unlikely event that it fails, the technologies behind it are ready to power several other products, including iPods with pretty much guaranteed sales.

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George Ou: all your gerbils are belong to us

George Ou is a blogger for ZDNet. You may be familiar with the clueless ramblings of this anti-Apple zealot, especialy if you've followed, in an ultimate test of geeky monomania, the story that Crazy Apple Rumors (seriously) covered under the apt title Security Bitch Watch, a sad series of events with so many twists, turns and so much idiocy that it would leave your head spinning, hadn't you fallen asleep about two minutes into it.

In his latest misguided rant, he argues that Apple shouldn't mock Vista's user access control system as annoying and insecure, since the Mac's similar system is even more so: it actually requires you to type your password (so it's more annoying), and requires that pretty rarely (so it's less secure). Touché!

But the true embarrassment arrives in the comments string, where Ou attempts to drive his point home by referring to none other than the infamous Joseph Gerbils.

Joseph Gerbils.

At first I thought I was missing some American cultural reference. But after staring blankly at the screen for about 20 seconds, frowning, and finally saying the name out loud, it dawned upon me that Ou actually meant to say Joseph Goebbels.

The Macalope gently classified this as a typo, but I beg to differ.

This ain't no typo. A typo means that you know how to spell something, but you miss it.

Spelling Goebbels as Gerbils means that you've never seen that name written down. You've only heard it spoken. And you may or may not have a clue who the hell this archvillain actually was.

In any case, you're talking about things you don't know that much about.

Um, when was that other time Ou was talking about stuff he didn't know much about? Was it maybe all the time?

Ou has this to say about the whole fiasco:

If that's how you want to judge me, that's your prerogative. I'm an IT guy; I don't spell German very well especially when I'm posting improvised notes in a comment section. But if that means you won't take my IT advice seriously (or at least objectively), I can only ask you to reconsider. Thanks for the correction.

He doesn't spell German very well.

Damn.

I didn't know he was trying to spell German there. Good thing he told us. I thought he had what may be called a "brain fart." One of those embarrassing moments when you absent-mindedly do or say something really stupid. A momentary lapse of reason.

But no, this was a real attempt at spelling German. He made an effort, and now thinks, based on the result, that his German spelling skill is "not very good."

Let me help clarify things a little here. If you spell Goebbels as "Göbbels" or "Goebels," we can agree that your German spelling is, no offense, but really "not very good."

However, if you spell it as "Gerbils," you're a jackass. It's hysterical. It's All Your Base caliber. You deserve to be laughed at till the day you die.

George Ou apparently thought that the way to spell a German word was to find the rodent whose name sounds the closest in English.

There's no use in trying to explain it away. Here's my advice to George Ou: quit writing. Now. And hide in a cave.

By the way, "advice" is spelled "Rat" in German. Don't try to pronounce it.


Update: There must have been a horrible misunderstanding. Joseph Gerbils was real. Read the comment below!

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Quote of the week from Daniel Eran

History reveals that partnering with Microsoft is like accepting a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter. One might as well just roll in seasonings and jump in the oven.

Gotta love the man. Great article, too.

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Steve Jobs and his case of incredible backdating stock options

Looks like some stock options were being backdated at Pixar as well. Ouch.

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Gates: Vista sucks, dunno how to fix it

OK, I've just read the infamous Bill Gates Newsweek interview, where the man tells some of the most embarrassingly bold-faced lies ever heard.

As the interview went live, like, five decades ago in internet years, it has since received most of the flak it deserves, for example, by the excellent Macalope.

However, I would like to reflect on a few things now, when the dust has more or less settled.

It has been covered that the interview sounds like a frustrated rant about Apple and the Mac, even though the whole piece was supposed to be about Vista, the brand new shiny Windows version that should have licensed the "65 million years of adventure in the making" slogan from Jurassic Park (at least, in internet years). Yet I find it noteworthy that in the interview, it was Gates who brought up Apple first:

The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.

Boom! He is talking about Windows security, and suddenly, he has to leash out against Apple, apropos nothing.

When did Microsoft become the underdog? Is it the beginning of the end? Is Microsoft growing tired of playing catch-up to Apple in just about everything except sheer volume? Is Bill Gates relapsing into the state of mind of his youth when Apple was the big guy and Microsoft was the poor wannabe? Does he fear that his company is going full circle after all these years?

But the real shocker comes later. When asked whether there will be another major version of Windows in three or four years, Gates has a staggering, unbelievable thing to say. I had to read it like four times, just to make sure I'm getting it right, and not missing a comma or a word somewhere. Here's what the chairman of Microsoft is saying about the latest and greatest version of Windows, the ubiquitous operating system that powers (yeah, right) 90% of all PCs worldwide:

Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that, otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Microsoft knows that Vista isn't good enough. But it has no idea how to make it better. So check back in about three or four years.

Um... If you're this bad about what you're doing, Dear Microsoft, and even your chairman knows… shouldn't you just quit?!

This is not humility or modesty. This is a flat-out admission of incompetence.
Looks like Microsoft has no quibbles about manufacturing the operating system for people who don't care. Hm. Maybe they should trademark that and use it as a slogan.

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Fake Steve should write Apple's PR

Fake Steve's thoughts on the iPod lock-in complaints:

it's akin to people saying, "I already bought this record on vinyl and it will only play on my turntable and not on my CD player. I mean I've tried putting it in the CD player and it's not even the right size! How can you sell me a piece of music that locks me in to one kind of player? And forget about putting it on my Zune! I tried that too and there's not even a slot where you can load the vinyl record in."

The man is good. He should be Apple's next CEO after the real Steve retires.
But here's a real prediction: he will either write editorials for mainstream newspapers, or have some sort of a presence at an Apple event within 12 months.

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In search of Spotlight on the iPhone

Only a handful of people outside Apple have had the chance to hold an iPhone in their hands, so we only know about it what Apple has publicly demonstrated (or allowed some lucky journalists to see on the few working prototypes).

Almost all of the functionality that Steve Jobs showed at the keynote is being presented as a series of demo movies on Apple's iPhone page, with the same glaring omissions (e.g. Notes and Calendar are both MIA).

This indicates that the iPhone isn't ready yet. Apple hasn't commented on the iPhone's features beyond what was revealed in January, so the product is still shrouded in a great deal of secrecy. In other words, what we haven't seen is either not planned, or simply not yet ready. We just don't know.

But one thing we really should have seen (but didn't) in a lot of the demos is the famous Mac OS X search box. The box with the rounded corners and the magnifying glass icon that first appeared in iTunes user interface, and became its main selling points. The box that has become synonymous with Mac OS X itself, the box that now appears in the Finder, in Mail, and just about every self-respecting Cocoa application. The search box that is now the front door to an excellent (and much-hyped) OS X search technology: Spotlight.

And that search box ain't there on the iPhone*.

We know that iPhone runs OS X. (Not Mac OS X, mind you, but still, some OS X. Jobs made a big deal of it at the keynote, listing its advantages and features.

Conspicuously missing was Spotlight.

Is it conceivable that Apple would ship its (first version of the) iPhone without Spotlight?

If one of the most important features of iTunes has been the easy searchability of large music libraries, how can the same feature be absent from the first iPod where it would be conceivable?

Scrolling through songs and genres and albums and so on is great, and it's fun, too, with the addictive multi-touch user interface. (I haven't tried it, but I'll believe whomever says so.) Yet why not let me search, too, just like in iTunes? What if I don't know the first word of a song's title? What if I only know the last name of the singer?

Jobs seemed especially proud of the iPhone's solution for a keyboard. Why not put it to some use then?

How about contacts? The Treo has got that one thing right. Shouldn't the iPhone at least match it?

As Jobs demonstrated the official way to select contacts, I was shaking my head. Again, flicking through names is cool, but quickly selecting contacts from a list has been done, and has been done better. Way better.

Even ordinary cellphones let you type in the first few characters of a name, and narrow your often-huge contact list down to your search results. Even with the cheapest multi-tap (not to be confused with Multi-touch) Nokia phones, one can quickly find a contact this way.

And if your phone has a QWERTY keyboard, the speed increase becomes dramatic. Add a smart search functionality, like that of the Treo, and (as Jobs would say) Boom! In literally less than a second after taking your smartphone in your hand, after all you did was type a few characters from a contact's name (could be as few as three keystrokes), you're one button press away from placing a call to the person you had in mind!

Flashy graphics aside, OS X notwithstanding, and however natural scrolling feels, it's dramatically less efficient to find and select a contact on the iPhone without a search functionality.

And again, what if you only remember a first name? A company name? A job title? A city?

Doesn't it just feel wrong if the iPhone won't give you one of the coolest, most useful OS X features: the possibility to narrow down a long list based on simply entering various uncategorized search criteria? Wouldn't such search functionality be the most useful on a handheld device, notably a cellphone, which you often use in urgent situations?

Spotlight alone, if fully implemented, could make the iPhone stand out even among the geekiest of smartphones. On the other hand, without any implementation of a search functionality, the iPhone could prove to be woefully inadequate in a field with cut-throat competition.

*Google Earth does have a search box, but I haven't found one anywhere else in any iPhone demo.

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Google Maps: lack of international searches boggles the mind

Google Maps should beat the hell out of ViaMichelin, with its maps superimposed over satellite images (if you want them that way), and its searching capabilities. But when you try to use Google Maps to search for an address that isn't located in the United States, most of the time, you'll get no results. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Rien.

It's not that Google Maps doesn't know about the street you're looking for. When you navigate there, you'll find it. By hand. By dragging the map. But searching for it? Nope.


What the hell is going on here? Wasn't Google started by two geeks who didn't care about anything but creating the perfect search engine? Isn't Google still about searching? Isn't it Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Since then, of course, Google has ballooned into an entire economy of its own, and it's easier to list the services it isn't offering as of 2006. (Full disclosure: Mac Thought Crime is powered by Blogger, also acquired by Google.) But has the company lost its focus in the process?

And ironically, while search sometimes doesn't work at all, it also tries to be too smart.
What's wrong with ViaMichelin's way of categorized information? I fill in the street and the city, and – boom! It's there.



It's not hard. It's no harder than typing the entire address in one text box and letting the software find out what I meant. Especially if it finds nothing. Or when the address is ambiguous, unless you specify what each part stands for: is it a city, a street, or a country?

Looks like it's hight time Google adopted another slogan to complement its famous "Don't Be Evil" motto: "Don't Suck."

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