Confessions of a User Experience Junkie

DF, regarding hardware acceleration for Flash video:

clearly, [Adobe and Apple are] working together to make Flash perform better on Mac OS X.

True, perhaps, for some values of “working” and “better”.

Adobe’s attempt to excuse themselves for poor Flash performance on the Mac by arguing that Apple didn’t provide necessary hardware acceleration APIs was always a red herring. As noted by the Flash engineer in the linked article, hardware acceleration for H.264 video is only available on a subset of the Mac installed base:

• MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
• Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
• MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
• iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

Don’t get me wrong; hardware acceleration for video is where the future is, and it’s great to see Apple and Adobe making nice and making improvements in this area. But there are still a lot of pre-2009 Macs in the field, on which Flash video performance continues to lag far behind both QuickTime’s performance on the same video stream and Flash-for-Windows performance on the same CPU — they’re all being done in software. It’s cases like these which betray Adobe’s lack of concern for a quality user experience.

Macalope (via DF):

Shorter EFF: buying stolen merchandise is fine as long as you write a story about it.

The EFF does lots of great work, but this seems a bit much. If felony theft is justifiable when it’s part of a journalistic endeavor, what other crimes are okay if you’re a journalist?

There’s a more interesting legal question in all this, though (or maybe not… I’m no lawyer). “Information from sources” is an abstract notion covered by the likes of patent, copyright, and trade-secret law. Physical goods, on the other hand, live in concrete reality — where they’re either in their rightful owner’s hands or not. Where does one draw the line between the two?

In other words, what if Nick Denton had paid $5000 to a sticky-fingered bar-crawler for photos and descriptions of the stolen phone instead of the item itself? What if a thief employed a thumb drive and a quick hand to copy design schematics from a careless engineer’s laptop, and then sold his find? What if information was leaked via stolen media (whether a digital storage device or good old-fashioned printed material)? There seems to be a gradient between “information” and “property” these days.

(If you haven’t been following the iPhone heist story, digging back from above links should catch you up. Also, Here’s a nice backgrounder if you don’t recognize this post’s title.)

From Neven Mrgan (via Gruber):

Trying to “clean out” your tray is not a habit you want to get into. It’s pointless, and besides, you can never win – as soon as you run another app, in the tray it’ll go. It’s like the world’s worst game of Whac-A-Mole. Instead, learn to see the tray as a “recent apps” area. If you’re in the middle of one task – say, writing an email – and you need to switch to something for a second — say, looking up a spelling — then the tray is your friend. But once you’re done with that, you’re done.

I’d take this a little bit further: if you’re trying to “clean out” the tray, you’re thinking too much like you’re on a desktop OS. And if you’re thinking like you’re on a desktop OS, you just might be outside the target audience.

Remember two weeks ago — before the iPhone OS 4 reveal — when everybody was talking up how great the iPad was for not multitasking? The argument we kept hearing then was that managing a bunch of concurrent application isn’t something a lot of users want to do. Actually, it’s something an awful lot of users don’t want to do — how many times have you heard about the guy who doesn’t know why his computer is so slow when he has no idea how many apps he’s running?

I’m betting a large (perhaps overwhelmingly so) number of iPhone OS 4 users will never care about quitting background recent applications, just as they don’t care about quitting applications on desktop operating systems. But they won’t suffer for this ignorance the way they do on desktop operating systems, and as a result they’ll have more time for the stuff they do care about.

I’m just here to say one thing: when Scott Forstall answered the question of “how do you quit apps” with “you don’t”, he wasn’t just being terse; he was looking out for your sanity.

To put it another way: he’s reminding you this isn’t the PC anymore.

Apple changed the big banner image on their home page last week… when you look at it on an iPad, it might make you think of this: