Icons vs. Text

Aside from petty discussions on whether Google is evil or not, design-wise it’s an exciting time to watch the evolution of their products. Services across the board are being redesigned, some from the ground-up. There are even traces of an emerging consistency between the web-services and the Android operating system.

One trend in particular I’m following with great interest, and that is the move from text-labels to icons. Here’s Gmail:

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It’s interesting because Google used to be a bastion of usability, and having only icons goes against what I’ve learned on the matter (which is that icon + text label reads best, only text label reads okay, icon only reads the least). So why did Google do this?

Google’s a big company. They’re known for being data-driven. So much, in fact, that they were once criticized for A/B testing shades of blue. Which means unless Larry Page has uprooted every previous principle the company was founded on (which I doubt), I’m pretty sure they’re watching the numbers on this one, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in the results on their icon vs. text-label A/B tests. The fact that the icons are still there in Gmail tells me that either the negative impact of icon-only navigation was negligible, or that the decision to go with icons only was forced through despite.

Icon-only navigation can be gorgeous, sure, and well-designed icons or icons based on established metaphors can be really easy to read. The trash-can, for example, is hard to get wrong. But surely some actions can’t easily be translated to icons only? Here’s the Android 4 camera app:

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In the above screen capture, I’ve opened up the photo configuration pane. From left — the ellipsis means “more settings”, “SCN” is short for “scene”, the plus/minus is “exposure”, the “AW” is “white balance” set to “auto”, and the lightning is “flash mode” set to off. The icons are gorgeous, but some of them don’t read very well. Particulary SCN means they threw in the towel on an icon.

So where did the whole “icons first” trend start? Android, maybe. From the brand new design guide:

Action bar icons are graphic buttons that represent the most important actions people can take within your app. Each one should employ a simple metaphor representing a single concept that most people can grasp at a glance.

You should really head over to the design guide, the icons really are beautiful, and they are a core aspect of Android 4 apps. To put it briefly: Android 4 apps rely heavily on the action-bar. The action-bar is a bar across the top of the operating system. On phones it features an app icon and app name on the left, and as many icon-buttons as there’s room for on the right. If there are more buttons than there’s room for, these buttons go in to the “action overflow” button, which is the small ellipsis. Click the ellipsis and the icons are shown in a dropdown menu by their text-label counterparts. It’s discussed at length on the Android Developers blog.

As beautiful as icons can be, is the lack of text-labels sacrificing usability? Here’s Photoshop Touch for Android:

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Compare and contrast with desktop Photoshop and the UI is a far cry. Obviously the two apps are no-where near feature parity, but UI-wise the difference is stark. The Android app relies on the clean, uncluttered iconography whereas the desktop app fills the top of system-bar with text-labelled dropdown menus.

I really don’t know what’s best. On the one hand, icons certainly make for a prettier UI. If screen real-estate is at a premium, icons can be smaller than text-labels, and the uniform size can make them easier to fit in a clean grid. Icons need no translation either, which is nice. On the other hand, a text label can say what the button does. Right there. On the button.

Quick thoughts on the new Google-Bar

When Larry Page took over the reins from Eric Schmidt, apparently one of his first decrees was that all of Googles properties were to look prettier. A team of designers came up with the new design, featuring greys, curry reds, whites and a black top-bar which featured sharing options and notifications. Now the black bar is being rid of, in favor of a more minimal Google Bar:

This is what it looks like in my Gmail (by the way, if you haven’t received this bar yet, here’s how you can get it now):

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Collapsing the black bar certainly gives some much welcome extra room (especially welcome in Maps and Reader). Also, I personally never used the plethora of links that sat right at the top of the page starting from left, so the collapsing of those into a dropdown menu makes some sort of sense.

The new bar is now without weirdness, though. First of all, in the implementation I’ve tried (by using the cookie hack linked earlier), the Google logo dropdown menu invokes on both hover and click. I’m personally a fan of click, since hover always feels slow to me, but it gets weird if you’re used to the Google logo taking you to the homepage. Take Gmail, for example, clicking the Gmail logo (which by the way is gone now), you’d be taken to your inbox. To get to your inbox now, you have to click the left-arrow that sits on top of your email.

It’s also a bit wierd that the Google.com homepage features a different Google-bar:

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… it’s obvious when you think about it, of course: you can’t have two colorful logos and two searchboxes competing on the same page. Oh by the way, that black dropdown shown in the screenshot above is not invoked by yours truly, it’s now shown by default when you visit the Google homepage. But at least they killed off the horrific white fade they had a while back.

It’s clear Google is in a state of flux at the moment. Some products are killed off, others are mutilated. At the same time, Google is prettier and more consistent than ever. Here’s hoping the dust settles at some point, and what made Google cool gets reintroduced.

Sync

For years my lunatic Apple friends have asked me: “when are you going to get a Mac?”. When I finally did, they started asking me: “when are you going to get an iPhone?”. As iOS is growing increasingly more useful with good notifications and over-the-air updates, my answer has been trimmed down to when it has a Gmail app that’s as good as the Android one. “Gmail with IMAP works great” is the usual knee-jerk reaction and “what’s so special about the Gmail app?” the followup question. I’m thinking perhaps it’s time I change my stock answer. I think my new response will be: sync.

This morning on my way to work I was listening to Macbreak Weekly. A bunch of my heroes, including John Gruber, were talking about iCloud sync and the problems some of them were experiencing. Tonya had factory reset her iPhone several times trying to get contacts to sync properly. Andy jokingly suggested the merging of contacts was painful and would sometimes merge 17 different versions of the same contact into a lean 12. Chris suggested it was a good idea to make sure you had a backup of the contacts, calendar and email setup you considered “canonical”, before embarking on your iCloud adventure. When the team started talking about the supposed iOS 5 battery drain, iCloud was almost universally assumed responsible for this.

Grubers level-headed approach was that, while he apparently had no problems himself, he did believe Apples iCloud transition was going to be monumentally difficult and compared it to stepping from solid ground on to a boat while carrying valuable trinkets. Transitioning MobileMe customers to a new free setup, making sure not only calendars, email and contacts sync, but also documents, was bound to generate some headaches, but they’ll pass in time, he suggested. I agree, I’m sure things’ll improve once Apple is on the boat.

Perhaps there is something to be said about Apples approach to sync. As much as they tout that “the truth is in the cloud” — as Yogi Berra would say: that’s only true when it’s true. It’s no secret Apple loves native apps. Native apps run faster, smoother, nicer than web-apps. You’ll hear many chant this, they might even use allegories such as “being closer to the metal” when describing why a web-app can never be as good as a native app. Let me tell you this: Yogi Berra doesn’t care. If it works, it works. If the app is good, it’s good. If things sync, things sync. And if they don’t sync properly, they don’t sync properly.

Googles overarching approach to sync is to not sync. Push the changes immediately. When you add a bookmark to your Chrome browser, a teensy signal is immediately sent to Googles bookmark sync server pushing the change. When you finish typing a word in Google Docs, changes are saved. There is no sync, because there are not copies of files anywhere. There is only one file. There is only one email. There is only one contact. You’ll never have to worry about whether your Android phone, tablet, or Macbook has the most recently edited version of your document, or which one has the most complete contact, or which calendar you added an event to. Because everything is always in sync. It just works.

You’d think it would get muddy if you scratched the surface and peeked underneath. If you do, you’ll find that Android sync is actually asynchronous, and that if you use Google Docs’ offline editing capabilities, you’ll actually end up with some of the same sync challenges that Apple is facing: which version is the right version? Somehow I’ve never once had a problem with this, though. I don’t know if it’s because Google started with the web-apps and built native apps and offline sync at a later time, but I have no trust issues with Google getting my sync right. I know that if I visit google.com/contacts and edit a contact, my changes will propogate to all my devices seamlessly. I never have to worry about losing contacts, losing appointments, losing emails, getting corrupt data, or even backing up. While these words may smell like famous last words, I wouldn’t even think of backing things up. I expect it to work, I trust that it will work, and has done so far.

Compared to the flaming hoops I had to jump through to get just calendars, contacts and Gmail to sync on my wifes iPhone, using an Android device is just a relief.

The Assassination of Google Reader by the Coward Google+

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I’m pretty excited about the visual shakeup that’s going on at Google these days. Gmail and Calendar are prettier than ever, and it looks like there’s even some cues that align with Android now. Google Reader was one of the last properties to get the overhaul, and I was rather nervous about the announced Google+ integration.

I was totally unprepared for the scorched earth tactic Google employed, though. It appears that Google, after applying the new look, systematically uprooted every pretty little flower that made Reader what it was. Google then ground up all the flowers into mulch, burned the mulch, and salted the ground.

What made Reader so great? The social stuff. For every feed item you could click “Share”, and other Reader users who followed you would then get a customized RSS feed with your shares. You could even add a small comment to the top of the shared feed item. This spurned quite a lot of discussion, some of which I’ve archived here. From a “simplify your product line, focus on fewer products”, I completely understand why Google did this. Google+ already supports sharing and commenting, so why not share directly to Google+ instead of to a dedicated RSS feed? Unfortunately, that’s whiteboard philosophy at its best, and it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of why Readers social ecosystem worked so well. Ironic, because Google+ is Googles social initiative. It’s really quite embarrasing.

I started writing a long blog post about how Google could fix reader and keep the Google+ integration. I thought long and hard about solutions to every problem introduced by the massacre. In the end, the frankenbuild that would have resulted from my advice would have been terrible. I even  went in to detail as to what exactly was massacred, but most of what I had to say has already been said elsewhere.

There’s a saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Let me be clear, I loathe that saying. It’s shortsigthed, backwards and reactionary. It stands in the way of progress, and indicates the previous iteration of whatever is being referred to, “ain’t broke”. Let me tell you a secret it took me half a lifetime to learn: nothing is ever perfect, and everything can be improved upon. The notion of “perfect” is silly and highly philosophical. Reader wasn’t  perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Finding people to follow was a ridiculous hassle, and advertising the fact that you were sharing on Reader was nigh impossible. But once you did follow someone in Reader, once you did start sharing and commenting on shared feed items, the experience was easy to follow, highly intimate and very enjoyable.

What remains is a good feed-reader, but everything social about it has been scrubbed. Good feed-readers are a dime a dozen, and the sharing features while really well-implemented, are not that hard to copy. It is not unlikely that someone will eat the lunch Google left on the table here. Perhaps Google is fine with that. Or perhaps they’ll listen to sense:

Dear Google,

Reader is about reading RSS feeds, so please make shared items show up in an RSS feed again. +1 buttons are fine, but “Share” and “Note” should append to your shared feed and nothing else. Google+ is also a fine way to advertise that you’re curating an RSS feed. A theoretical integration with the circles might even make sense. But keep discussions, feed items and shares in Reader — where it belongs.

Google Chrome, Metro-Style

Windows 8 is a pretty bold new move for Microsoft. It’s bright, vivid, touch friendly and puts apps and contents way up top. It appears to have ditched the traditional desktop metaphor and filesystem. Apps look very different. Here’s what Internet Explorer 10 looks like:

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That new look and feel for apps is being referred to as “Metro-style”. Metro-style apps run fullscreen and navigation happens through edge-activated interfaces. While I’m concerned about discoverability for edge-activated interface controls (essentially this is classic mystery meat navigation), I do like that apps are full-screen and that Metro-style apps ditch all archaic notions of UI chrome.

Which brings me to Google Chrome, capital C. Really great browser, my such of choice. From a high-level perspective, Google built this browser to accelerate the pace of web technology development, so that Googles own web-apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs — could adopt newer features sooner. To that end, Google has gone to great lengths to make sure Chrome is not only cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, soon Android), but that Chrome looks native to each platform. This tenet has been taken to the extreme, actually, with Chrome on Windows XP featuring the horrible “Luna” skin, and Chrome on Linux more or less establishing GTK as the de-facto UI toolkit on the platform, just to be able to use said toolkit. It’s really quite impressive, the amount of work put into making Chrome not only look native, but be native.

Of course we’re only on the cusp of the future. The next round of operating systems are likely to be much more mobile inspired. Windows is blazing a trail with adopting the Windows Phone Metro UI, OSX is likely to become even more iOS-like, and Ubuntu is already exploring more touch-friendly UIs. If Google is going to keep following the path of full-on nativity, Chrome engineers are going to be having some nasty headaches in the not too distant future. Is it even technically possible to replace Internet Explorer 10 as your browser of choice? With Windows 8 treating HTML5 web-apps as first-class citizens among native apps, it’s likely that IE is baked in to the operating system more deeply than it ever was before.

It’s also an intereting mind-game, imagining what Google Chrome would look like, if it were to theoretically be re-written as a Metro-style Windows 8 app. The Metro-style UI is already so minimalist in layout, icon style and even interaction patterns that it’s difficult to think of Metro-style Chrome looking very much different from IE10. The racing-car diagonal tabs for instance, which are important to Chrome’s branding, are hard to translate to Metro-style. Though I suppose if Google were to go this way, they could make their tabs look similar to those of the Android Honeycomb browser (which is likely to spell the direction of how Chrome will look like on Android, once that happens).

Will it happen? I think so, but I think Google will want to play the wait-and-see game for a while. Just like Android Ice Cream Sandwich may be a make-or-break proposition for Google, so do I think that Windows 8 is for Microsoft. Could be that Windows 8 adoption is too slow to worry about. Could be Google’s already working on Metro-style Chrome.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich Might Be A Make-Or-Break Release

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Yesterday, Samsung and Google announced an October 10th event, probably to unveil a long-rumored new Nexus phone running the new version of Android. Today, that new Android version was shakily demoed. Being a huge Android fan I follow this intently. I love Android because it’s so open that Amazon can go ahead and build something entirely different with it. Living in Gmail and Google Calendar, I love that everything syncs headache-free when I sign in to my phone. The Gmail app, specifically, is what makes Android my favorite dish among an increasingly diverse mobile marketplace. But despite my love for Android, I think Android’s next release, “Ice Cream Sandwich”, will be a make or break release for Google.

Make or break? Really? Well, make or break for the Google curated version of Android, yes. Obviously the Linux core is not going to disappear, but Android is at a crossroads. One path sees Android eventually showing a return on investment for Google, the other does not.

I like to pretend I understand the broken windows theory more thoroughly than I actually do, so I often invoke it outside of its criminological roots. The gist of the theory is that if you walk past an abandoned building with a couple of broken windows, there’s a greater chance that you would reach for a rock and break one of the remaining windows, than had the building manager made sure to repair the broken windows before you got there. Evil you!

Android is under fire from all directions. Apple vehemently sues HTC and Samsung for stealing their look and feel, Microsoft is attacking for underlying Linux patents they claim to have, and Oracle arguably has the upper hand in one high-profile lawsuit. If Android was a fortress in a desert, it would be under siege from all directions, and at some point the supplies will run out. Google appears unfazed by the attacks but I bet it’s getting to them. Having recently bolstered their patent war chest with the purchase of Motorola, Google is better positioned to fend off the lawsuits. Heck, they might even turn around Motorola and have the company produce delicious, Google-curated Android devices. But by the time this happens, a little year from now, it may already be too late. Right now, Android has a lot of broken windows.

The attacks against Android are reaching the public ear. “Google’s copying Apple”, “Android isn’t really open”, “Android users don’t buy apps”. It doesn’t even matter whether these stories are true or not — if they persist, they’re likely to make the customer walking into a Verizon store skip the Android phone and pick the platform he thinks is “going to be around”. (Or he’ll buy anything, but that’s not a business model.)

That’s a grim future which sees Android falter. But fortunately that’s just one potential outcome. Android still has a disruptive business model: it’s a free operating system with free top-shelf GPS navigation, and it gets users to use Google apps so there’s a halo effect. Now all Google needs is a decisive victory. They need a phone that just looks great, has a UI that’s responsive, fluid and extremely delightful to use. And Google needs this phone to sell like ice cream. Sandwiches.

I would assume Google knows this, and that it’s why they hired Matias Duarte to up the ante on the UI design. The Nexus S is a gorgeous device, all black like the night without the stars, so clearly Samsung can create beautiful hardware when they put their minds to it, wink wink. If the combination (which may be revealed October 10th) is both user-friendly, snappy and delightful, it might just sell like those aforementioned treats. This’ll inspire HTC and Samsung to stick with Android. It’ll further Androids reach, ensuring a larger portfolio of apps. It might even make an Android tablet a value proposition. Put simply, if Google can rally the forces behind a decisive platform release and instill renewed motivation in its partners, these partners might continue their legal fights with fresh energy as opposed to settle and pick other platforms.

On the other hand, if Ice Cream Sandwich is not the watershed release Google needs, the platform might slowly wither away. As stuffed as Googles pockets are, they’re not going to keep throwing money at Android with no return on investment in sight. There’s no sense in being the number 1 smartphone platform if it’s not making you money. That would be a Pyrrhic victory.

Google Music Beta review

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Music Beta is Googles new cloud-streaming music service. It lets you to upload all your music files (up to 20,000) to Googles servers and then lets you stream them wherever you are through a web-interface or to your Android phone. It’s US-only at the moment1.

How it works

There are two ways to access your music once you’ve uploaded it all: via the Android app and the web-interface.

The Android app allows you to “pin” music for offline availability. This will ensure the album of your choice is cached for offline use. This is a very Google thing to do — your stuff is in the cloud, everything simply accesses it from there. You could call this Wi-Fi sync for your music, but it’s better: all the music you want offline you pin until you no longer want it. It works wonderfully.

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The web-interface does not at the moment support offline caching. No doubt Google will implement this feature once the kinks get worked out of the HTML5 local storage feature, but for the time being you can only stream from there.

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The web-interface works remarkably well. It’s responsive, easy to use, searchable and music plays excellently in full quality with no noticable delay between tracks. I find it a breeze to use compared to iTunes2. If you’re a Chrome user, you’ll also want the Better Music Beta extension for easy play/pause controls and hook-ups with Last.fm (it has has revived my account there). I’m also told the web-interface works on the iPhone (without the pinning/caching feature, obviously), though I haven’t been able to verify this.

So why would you want your music in the cloud? Isn’t it easier and faster to have it stored locally? And what about streaming it to the phone, that’s gotta be expensive on 3G!? The answer is that you want Google Music because you want one central location to store all music. One canonical archive from which all your devices access your stuff. Music over 3G is not going to be a problem in the future, and until then — if you’re on Android — the pinning feature will make sure that’s not a problem. It just works.

Except of course, for the elephant in the room.

Google did not manage to get the music labels approval. So there’s no music store. You’ll still have to rip your CDs, buy your music from Amazon or iTunes and then upload it. There’s also no convenient “matching” service, which would fingerprint your MP3 files or your CDs and let you skip the upload3, instead granting you access to an existing copy.

The verdict

It’s a weird situation. I’ve yearned for a service just like this for years. One I could upload my music to — the music I’ve amassed on hundreds of CDs over the years. But now that I have it, it almost feels dated already. To make matters worse, I’m not sure a music store and a fingerprinting service would’ve improved the situation. In fact, my gut tells me the future is in streaming all-you-can-eat, i.e. what Rdio does. What’s so great about owning stuff anyway?

Wait. Let’s back up. Music Beta is awesome. There’s a hump you have to get over in uploading, and at the moment it works best if you’re an Android user. You also still have to buy your music elsewhere. But what Music Beta is, is distilled awesome. I totally love this thing, and the only reason it doesn’t get 6 hearts is because the music industry stole a heart. Hey music industry, I’m right here. I have money. I want to give it to you. Why won’t you let me?

♥♥♥♥♥♥
  1. That is to say it works outside of the USA, but you have to be in the USA when you request an invite  ↑
  2. Disclaimer: I have an extreme bias against iTunes  ↑
  3. It does bear mentioning that the uploader works very well. It sits in the background and eventually it’s done. In “weeks”, as they say, but if you forget it, and chances are you will, then it’s not much of a bother  ↑

Google +1 button anywhere bookmarklet

Whipped up a quick bookmarklet that lets you manually put the Google +1 button on any webpage you visit. This is good if you’re using the +1 button for aggregating links on your profile. Once installed, click the button on any page you visit to add a +1 button in the top right corner of the webpage.

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar → +1 here