"Early-stage theories"

Trevor Blackwell of Y Combinator has a nice post on how start-up founders need to be like people developing early-stage theories. Kinda hard to explain, but it's quite good.

'Simplicity is Complicated'

As I've mentioned before, I think most discussions of simplicity are, well, major oversimplifications.

When people say the problem with certain systems is 'complexity' and that the solution is 'simplicity' what they really mean is actually specific sorts of complexity are the problem, and specific sorts of simplicity are the solution. I don't even think the issue is really best understood as a matter of of 'complexity' or 'simplicity', but that's another matter.

In 'Simplicity is Complicated', Avdi Grimm tries to tease out various different sorts of simplicity. He also talks about the tradeoffs that can be involved in each type.

These are the types he talks about

• Minimizing unnecessary effort.


• Hiding complexity.


• Avoiding difficult-to-understand features.


• Avoiding formal architecture.


• Elegance of design.


• Staying close to the domain.

An idea for a multi-touch rhythm game

Here's an idea for a rhythm game for the iPhone that exploits  the phone's multi-touch capabilities. 

Most rhythm games involve pressing or tapping on one of a fixed set of positions.  In Guitar Hero those positions are button positions, in Dance-Dance Revolution they're floor tiles, and so on. 

Touch-screens let the taps be anywhere on the screen.  Like in Elite Beat Agents on the DS where circular markers pop up on the screen showing you where to tap.   The sequence of places to tap usually follow a spatial pattern - eg in a line or an arc.  Following these patterns around adds some interest to the game.  It's more dynamic. Rhythm and movement work well together.  

On a multi-touch screen you could have a different style of game.  It could have the user make multiple touches at once, where the had to simutaneiusly tap points in a particular spatial pattern.  It might get them to simultaneously tap three points arranged in a line, then simultaneously tap four points arranged like the end points of a cross. The focus would be on the progression of spatial configurations.     

And just like how Elite Beat Agents also sometimes made the player slide the stylus along a path, this game could make the use simultaneously slide fingers accross multiple paths.  For example, where their fingers start out at like the four corners of a box and have to simultaneously slide towards the box's center. 

I'm imagining something where it's like the players fingers are performing a dance. Something a bit like twister for your fingers, but rhythm elements to it. Maybe you could call it Finger Dance.

(this is the first time I've composed a post on my iPhone - nice use of a bus trip)  

Microsoft's 'Courier' tablet actually looks quite cool (video)

See this video:

Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

"Ten IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get"

Stu Smith writes about Ten IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get.

It's easy to take things for granted when you're familiar with them. The ten items he describes are:

1. When to Click and When to Double-Click
2. Hierarchical Folders
3. Using Add/Remove Programs
4. Installing Bundled Software Hurts
5. That There Is A Choice Of Software
6. What Updates Do
7. Software Licensing
8. What Memory (RAM) Is For
9. How To Use Networking
10. The Display Is Not The Computer

Some additional ones from the comments:

"selecting vs highlighting"

"selecting vs highlighting": This one is really technical for the layperson because it isn’t what they first think. I often make the mistake of telling people to "select" a piece of text instead of "highlight" it. To them, "select" has to do with tangible objects on the screen like pictures whereas "highlight" has to do with text selection. I probably say "select" because on Mac OS X (the OS I use) text really does act like any other object. It can be dragged and manipulated like everything else, and this behaviour is much more obvious than on Windows. I might also say it because I understand some of the mechanics behind the way applications are made and, of course, the primary language of Mac apps is (Object)ive-C.

The scrollbar:

"Why do I pull it down to make the screen go up?"

being able to run multiple simultaneous tasks, and the relationship between opened-windows and the desktop:

Many users don’t understand that computers can run multiple simultaneous tasks. Users tend to see programs (from opening to use to closing them) as a linear process they must step through properly, forward and backward. i.e. Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Word > now I need to get "on the Internet" > Close ("X out of") Word > Start > All Programs > Internet Explorer. Rinse and repeat.

Many people don’t realize that programs are opened in a Window on top of their desktop. I can’t recount how many times I had a small web browser window open on a 30? display only to have people say "Wow your screen is very small," only to have them change to "WOW! That is a big screen!" once I’ve pressed the maximize button.<

I find both of these concepts tie nicely together in showing that users are somehow trained to have a sort of "tunnel vision" when using programs. I think the classic desktop GUI was originally centered around completing tasks in a modal or linear fashion, discouraging people from unlocking the true powers of multitasking. I find this helps to explain why multiple (physical) monitors/displays is a great way to improve efficiency in the workplace versus concepts like "spaces" on Mac not being as effective (in a mainstream sense) as they could be.

See also the discussion on that post on Hacker News.

I'd also add
– file extensions
– why you can only have certain characters in file names
(both of which are quite understandable)

The interesting question is: what are the best ways to teach these concepts to Non-IT people?

"Pesuade xor Discover"

Paul Graham considers the following issue: When writing, the plain truth (as you see it) will often be offensive to people. You can try and avoid this, but it doing so means being less concise, because you have to add disclaimers and write more indirectly. Is this worth it?

Maybe not. Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness. I write code the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. But I have a legitimate reason for doing this. You don't know what the ideas are until you get them down to the fewest words. The danger of the second paragraph is not merely that it's longer. It's that you start to lie to yourself. The ideas start to get mixed together with the spin you've added to get them past the readers' misconceptions. [4]

That's not even the worst danger. I think the goal of an essay should be to discover surprising things. That's my goal, at least. And most surprising means most different from what people currently believe. So writing to persuade and writing to discover are diametrically opposed. The more your conclusions disagree with readers' present beliefs, the more effort you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go any faster.

(my emphasis).

I fully agree about the dangers there. I think it's important to treat writing as a means to figure out your view and that only at the very end should you be concerned with issues to do with communicating it to others. I think that to do otherwise is to limit yourself - a kind of premature optimisation, and from what I know of other's writing I think they most people get into those concerns far too early - either right at the start or early on in the process. This also seems to be the way writing is taught.

Don't purchase any music from Bleep.com

[update: 15.10.09: four and a half weeks after I originally purchased the music they finally managed to make the download available to me.]
[update: 4.10.09: over three weeks since I purchased the music and I still can't access it. I've had more correspondence with Bleep: twice they've wrongly said the problem was fixed when in fact nothing had changed. Then they said there was a bug in their system. They refunded me the money then. But since I still own the copy I purchased from them, it'd be throwing my money away to go purchase it elsewhere, so I'm still effectively prevented from being able to listen to the music until they get their act together. And refunding me the money doesn't address all the wasted time and frustration I've had to go through. It was a week ago when they told me about the bug in their system, and I haven't heard from them since. If they had any decent customer service, they could easily find an alternative way to get the music to me].

---

I was really keen to get the Autechre album "Draft 7.30" but I couldn't find it at the shops. When I got home and looked on the internet I discovered, through the music publisher's (Warp Records) site, that you could buy it online as MP3s at Bleep.com.

So I purchase it and went to download it. Because my internet connection at home is flaky, the download failed and failed four more times. Each time i was only able to get a tiny fragment of the entire file before it failed - the most it ever got on an attempt was 2.75MB. I went to try again and found that the download link was disabled. It didn't actually say why, but I presume this was an anti-piracy measure.

I didn't see any mention of a limit to the number of times you can download it. Maybe there was in the fine-print of the terms and conditions, but there was certainly nothing made obvious about it, and nothing mentioning it on the download page. I never saw anything there saying how many download attempts I had left, or saying that now I'd used up the number of attempts. The download button just stopped being clickable (I tried other browsers to see if it was some problem at my end, but it wasn't). There was no explanation at all.

If this is an anti-piracy measure, then it should stop people after five successful downloads. I wasn't able download the music once, I just had five quickly-failed attempts.

But then why is there a limit at all? If someone can download it once, then if they wanted to give copies to their friends they could still easily do that. If someone gave out or published their Bleep login details, so anyone could just log into the account and download the music, then this would also allow anyone to purchase more music on their credit card, so that's hardly going to happen.

So I don't see any point to a download limit anyway. All think it does is send out a message to a legitimate purchaser that Bleep.com does not trust them.

I then used their feedback form to send them a message explaining the situation. They say they'll try to get back to you within one working day. I bought the music on a Saturday, so that means I'd have to wait till around Tuesday morning (their time). I think this is pretty slack. Online stores are always open. If the store can take your money anytime, 24/7, then it seems a bit slack for them to only deal with customers' problems on week days.

The next day I sent them a rather more annoyed message. It's ridiculous that you can hand over money for something and be prevented from actually obtaining it. It's crazy that it is far easier to pirate music than to buy a legitimate copy.

It's now Wednesday -- four days after I purchase the music and sent them my first message explaining the problem -- and I still haven't gotten any response at all. After being screwed around like this, my advice is: don't buy music from Bleep.com. I certainly won't be.