byJoeyBaker » Creative

Microsoft Should Kill IE 6 Tonight: Why I Disagree With Leo Laporte

Joey — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:19:55 +0000

Listen to This Week in Google #34. Cue to 37:00~ish.

On the most recent This Week in Google, Leo Laporte, in conversation with Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis (all 3 of whom I respect greatly) asserts that Microsoft cannot shut down their Internet Explorer 6 browser because businesses are too slow to adapt and the vast majority use Microsoft products. “It’s the price of success,” Leo asserts. That’s bullshit. It’s Microsuck’s monopolistic success that allows to announce that as of tonight, IE6 – hell let’s throw in IE 7 too – are no longer supported, and will not receive updates. A free update to IE8 is at this URL. (Or better: go for a browser that supports standards: Safari, FireFox, or Chrome) They can do that, even with most enterprise environments relying on them because they have every environment relying on them. Where else are their customers going to go!? I was shocked to find that both Gini Tripani who is a huge supporter of open source and Jeff Jarvis who coined the term “do what you do best,” let Leo get away with the statement. If Microsoft arbitrarily decided to do anything their customers would have no choice but to follow. That’s what comes from being a monopoly.

PC vendor revenue.

James Surowiecki‘s latest piece in The New Yorker, Soft in the Middle, addresses this point: produce high end or low end products, the middle road is too mushy. Case in point: It’s better the be Apple than Dell and better to be H&M than Gap. The wide middle isn’t desirable or profitable. Microsoft, in its position of high, low, and middle of the market, should take a lesson from Apple. They should be opinionated, stop trying to please everyone, and make a few firm decisions that benefit us all – even if it’s a bit painful in the short-term. After all, it’s not like they have much of a reputation to defend.

*worth noting: I’m an Apple Fanboi

Similar Posts:

UI Guesses for Google Chrome OS

Joey — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:12:33 +0000

Google’s ChromeOS, might be vaporware, but the idea of a Google built OS is an interesting thought experiment in design. Knowing that Google is engineer friendly, have a business based on search, and a tendency toward minimalist design, leads me to the following guesses:

The paper paradigm is antiquated. Navigation will be dead, this will be a search driven OS. That means that they’re gonna do something with the desktop, as in forget you had one. An analogy: If your current desktop is like the Yahoo homepage (cluttered, full of everything), a ChromeOS desktop will be like the Google homepage: a search bar.
Apps? What apps? You’re not gonna be able to run photoshop on this. You don’t need to. This isn’t designed for people who need apps. It’s designed for people that do email, web, and word. All of which can be done in the cloud.
You’re not gonna see ads all over the place. Think Gmail ads, not google search ads. Small, inline.
Local storage won’t matter – the goal here, is to store all you data in the cloud. Besides, this is gonna be for netbooks, what data do you have that can’t be stored in the cloud? Think about the difference between the Palm Pilot and the iPhone. On a Palm, you had to sync all of your data to bring it with you. The iPhone can store it all (even your music) in the cloud. ChromeOS will operate the same way. I’d expect to see a 3G modem, similar to the Kindle, built into devices.

Finally, for all those calling it vaporware, I say this: Google has yet to disappoint. The Android OS had a similar lack of information too. I have faith! :)

Similar Posts:

Design Says to Shovelware: ‘I Need More Whitespace’ — a Design Critique of TIME

Joey — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:00:58 +0000

I took two lessons from Time’s Q&A with Bill Keller. The first, outlined in Dear Bill Keller, was intended be a short reaction to the piece, that turned into a 1600 word article. This post outlines the second takeaway, and will be 1000 words. Pictures are worth 1000 words right? :) Take a look at the comparison between the print and online layouts of that article below.

click for a larger version

The print layout is clearly, superior. It’s far easier to read, offers a summary of what the article is at an eye’s glance.

Multiple Pages The online version requires the user to click to a second page to read the whole article. Yet, the print version fits handily on one page. WHY!? There is no newshole online! Stop making it difficult for us to get to the end of the article!
Ads Admittedly, the print version shares a spread with a full page ad, but the content remains ad free. The online version feels cramped. There are two, small, intrusive ads, that serve to distract from the content.
Styling is Gone This is a great example of why shovelware is bad for design. The print version nicely separates out questions, credits, and answers with font styles. The online version? Nothing. Someone just copy-pasted the content out of a text document. It’s much harder to read than the article, let alone tell that it’s a Q&A.
The Sidebar is Distracting Even if Google is my homepage, there is far too much content presented to draw me in. The sidebar is full of irrelevant stuff that distracts me from the article. The clean, minimalistic design in print is far more eye-catching.

The Takeaway

Use subheads Give the reader entry points. Especially online where people are used to reeading short blurbs of text are are prone to skimming as they scroll.
Don’t forget the rule about one piece of dominant artwork It’s amazing how truly good design never changes. Presenting one place for the eye to center on that sums up the content is a design trait that goes to the way we think – regardless of the medium.
Leave some whitespace Clutter on the page makes your content hard to read. Just because your CMS allows you to dump in your content and move on, it doesn’t mean you should. Giving this article the same amount of design time in both print and online would have helped a lot. I’d bet that the amount of design time for the web could be much less.

Similar Posts:

Signed and Released: Side Projects Are So Good

Joey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:05:38 +0000

Common thinking in the photography industry is to always have a side project going in addition to your main job. Work, even photography work, is tough. You’ve got to have a personal project going to keep you sane. Turns out having a side project can lead to some really good work too. Just ask Google about their 20% rule. After a long time of not following this sage advice, I am now fortunate enough to announce two.

The Vancouver Project

A good friend of mine, Andrew Burton, and I have been talking for a couple of months about the rise of DSLRs with video capability and what it the implications for sports photographers. Andrew had the foresight to see that this new technology would come to head in the very near future – namely the coming winter Olympics in Vancouver. Exploring thought, we also realized that this Olympics would be the first since the rise of the real-time web, live video broadcasting from cell phones, Google Wave, and, and, and. Our realization lead to a plan of action which we’re calling The Vancouver Project. Stop by and check us out. Shameless plug: if you’re in a position to help by spreading the word to the right people we’d love to hear from you.

Linked Photographer

In other news, I’m writing a book. That is a very weird sentence for me to write. I write posts, tweets, cutlines… not books. But, apparently, that’s happening :) An excellent friend of mine, and phenomenal fashion photographer, Lindsay Adler, approached a few months ago saying that she was looking into writing a book, would I be interested in co-authoring? Today, I signed the contract. We’ll be writing a book that’s got the tentative title Linked Photographer. It will be part treaties, part howto, and part reference on how photographers can use social media for business. It’s a bit more than a for-dummies book, but We’ll be launching linkedphotog.com soon, so stay tuned!

Similar Posts:

A Web Design Critique of Google News

Joey — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:49:53 +0000

I recently critiqued the redesign of Newsweek, and was pleased to see the positive response. I sorta promised that this would become a regular feature for me, so I’ll try to hold to that. I’m only looking at homepages. Critiquing a whole site is a lot of work. I’ll do it someone wants to pay me though :] After leading a webinar for CoPress on homepage design, I’ve done a lot of research into mainstream homepages – what works and what doesn’t. For the second go at this, let’s look at Google News. Google has an … involved … relationship with the media industry. Newspapers have accused Google of stealing their content, rumors say Google thought about buying a newspaper, and much to the chagrin of journalists everywhere, Google started linking to Wikipedia in the Google News results. With all the hype, you’d think Google News was an incredible product that attracted a ton of pageviews. (Actually, Yahoo News gets more hits) In truth, Google News reveals itself to have many poor design principals, and, despite some good ideas, to be an eyesore that is really designed for one purpose: act as a search engine for news articles.

Highly customizable: Easily the best part about the design is the amount of control given to the user over the content they want to see. Google throws out the idea that every user needs to see political and world news. You can setup search modules to show very customized content too.
Color coded: it’s trivial, but an important visual cue. This works pretty well in the nav bar, but the execution on the rest of the site is poor. They take a strong visual cue, and tone it way down.
Google Juice: the site is really geared to be used as a search engine, and it shows. From the wonky side navigation, to the really cool “recommended for you” section that uses your search history to find you news, Google News is clearly designed to search your news, not browse to it.
Art? What art? OK, there is some art, but its really small. Visually impressive, this site is not.
Link List: Can you avoid the impression that the page is just a huge list of links? I can’t. It would be nice to have some attempt at styling, design, etc…
Summaries: Google News works because of automation, but the lack of hand-crafted summaries really limits the usability.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Illustrations & Maps online New Media

Overall, Google News design gets a 2/5. It’s got customization, but it’s really not a friendly UI. The site clearly uses a grid style design, but there’s too many eyelines – I can’t decide where to look. As an execution of the ‘river of news‘ concept, gNews misses one key aspect – you can only have one river at a time, or else, the eye gets lost. Google gets this right with search results, but somehow that design philosphy didn’t carry over to gNews. Perhaps my best suggestion for Google: bigger images. Much bigger. Draw the eye in.

Similar Posts:

Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web

Joey — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:00:23 +0000

There will be many – many – blog posts written on Google Wave, and there already have been so many created, that I’m sure this one will be lost in the void, but for whomever keeps ‘The Record,’ add me to it saying: “Google Wave will revolutionize communication.” I’m throughly shocked by the number of naysayers out there. The reaction on Twitter after the announcement, and the excellent review of the event on TechCruch, was mixed. Some were just as enthusiastic as me, but many have the wait-and-see attitude that, to me, doesn’t recognize the pure awesomeness that is Google Wave. There are only two obstacles Google Wave has to overcome to become as widely used as Google Search that I can see: market penetration and standards adoption.

HTML5

The switch to Wave is going to rely on HTML5, a standard that has been 5 years in the making. That’s a really long time coming. The same year the standard got it’s start gave birth to Facebook, Gmail was still new, and IE was still 91% of the browser market. In Internet terms, HTML5 has been in progress since the middle ages. Changing the basic language of the web is a drastic change, and we need to be sure that the standard is right. Yet, surely we can adapt to adding new standards at a quicker rate? Because all “modern” browsers are open-source, and have a track record for continuous innovation, it’s inconceivable to me that was couldn’t innovate on a faster scale. Five years is an awful long time, and it’s incredible how much – of the draft spec – the browsers are already supporting. HTML5 will bring about a friendlier internet – one that feels like a desktop experience. We have the technology to deliver that – why wouldn’t we?

Acceptance

To my mind, the harder part of making Wave successful is getting people to use it. I don’t just mean sign up. I mean, use it. The pure genius of Wave is that it centralizes all communication.

Everything.

All of it.

That means your email (gone for sure), your IM (no doubt), your sticky notes (why not?), your documents (probably), your faxes (people still use that protocol!?), your text messages (not demoed, but why not!?), your blog posts (wordpress plugin anyone?), your blog comments (Hallelujah!), your twitter (likely) …your everything. If you’re going to really use Wave, that means throwing out all of your old tools. Get rid of your email client, forget AIM, loose the SMS plan. They’re not needed. As long as people can write some extensions for backward compatibility to those folks still stuck in the HTML4, pre-2009 era, there won’t be a reason to keep the old communications around.

One Source

Having one place for all of your communication is such a simplification of life that we ought to all go buy Google a beer – scratch that – a nice bottle of wine. You’ll have the time to drink it with all the … time … Google just saved you. And that’s just the first thing Wave will do for you – save you time. It’s going to be easier than ever to communicate with folks. With the email paradigm broken and quicker, simpler, communication the norm, we’ll spend time in the inbox – it just won’t be as painful.

The End of the Cowboys

The other thing I see Wave doing is moving us toward a community driven internet. One of the biggest problems that the web has always had is trust. The Web is still very much like the old Wild West. The Wild West was an era that determined how the western US would be settled. The Western frontier times ended once cities started to become established; commerce settled down, and laws could be written and enforced. The establishment of cities is a good metaphor for building online communities. But, there is one key factor that most online communities lack that new towns always had: trust. Small towns are a place where everyone knows everyone. Small cities are just many of these communities put together – there’s an intricate network of relationships. All of which are built on the idea that people know and trust each other. When people don’t have a personal relationship with a part of their community, they have a trust in certain community institutions. Grocery Stores, for example, are a real marvel of commerce – not because of their business model (which is pretty good), but because they’ve standardized the way people buy food and guarantee a good supply. We’re not worried about food at all in our society – we trust that grocery stores will always be around to provide what we need. On the Wild Web, we’re still learning the ropes. Institutions are still being built, and we’re still trying to figure out how to build relationships with literally everyone in the world. Buying a product online can still be risky proposition. Everything from credit card theft to non-reputable dealers (far more common) puts you at risk. Engaging in Internet communities is a leap of faith too. Who really is stargirl73 answering your tax question on that forum? And what jack-ass is flaming you on your own blog? The solution here? Create an institution that standardizes identities. If everyone uses one tool for communication, then it becomes easy for them to build a reputation. Wave will make it simple to build a profile of who you are. Others can you can get a sense of everything you’ve said and what you think. That’s just like building a reputation for yourself in the ‘real world.’

In real life, you don’t get to create a new identity at every store you walk into, every party you go to, every employer you interview with. You are who you are, and your reputation goes with you. Wave will help bring that concept to the web, hopefully, building trust that will allow us to have real community online.

Videos

Similar Posts:

A Web Design Critique of the Newsweek Redesign

Joey — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:40:45 +0000

Newsweek’s redesign/relaunch today revealed a much cleaner, more web friendly site. Many improvements have been made, and you can tell that they’re thinking hard. However, there’s still room to improve. The essential problem with the site is that it still feel liks a newspaper site, not a online newsorg. Check out the embedded PDF for a look at the annotated homepage of the site and a few quick, overall notes below.

The design is nice and clean with a solid red motif, but the widgets are sorta hard to tell apart, they don’t really have a bottom.
I know that Newsweek is a partner of MSNBC, but promoting that connection so heavily may not be so smart. MSNBC should get equal billing (see: Slate and WaPo), or be totally integrated.
The choice to push the blogs so heavily is interesting (They have a widget and a nav bar). Not bad, just interesting. I’m curious to know if that works out.
Serious Fun is all kinds of UI hell. The side arrows to mean neutral is just down right confusing , and it’s got very prominent placement on the F pattern of user reading. I’m all down for turning polls into something more of a game, but rethink the UI here.
Props for having links to other newsorgs. That’s a valuable service that Newsweek is developing. The fact that you get to the other site through a frame is, again, interesting. Cheers to experimentation.

Newsweek Homepage Critique

Publish at Scribd

A few css issues on the new redesign. I recommend: max-width :)

Update

Looks like there are still some css issues to be worked out too. This is a close up of the top slider section.

Update2

Looks like the content of the change isn’t that great either.

Similar Posts:

LIVE | NPPA Photo Workshop

Joey — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:55:55 +0000

I’ll be livestreaming the Syracuse University NPPA photo workshop at 4:00pm EST. Click the link to watch here, or go straight to the Mogulus channel at mogulus.com/cutline. Similar Posts:

Lightroom or Aperture?

Joey — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:51:51 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

This gets filed under the old news category, but I thought I’d share a demo I did on Lightroom several months ago. (oh, and that’s my first submission to slideshare!)

Lightroom Workflow Intro

View more presentations from jbaker071. (tags: photography software)

Similar Posts:

Why the Nikon D3 Sucks (and What the D4 Oughta Be)

Joey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:27:55 +0000

I love me the Nikon D3. It’s the first camera that I’ve used where I feel confident going into any situation. The high ISO performance, huge LCD, dual CF card slots, 9 FPS, and 12MP files are amazing. Safe to say, Nikon hit a home run with this camera. That said, I’ve got some complaints. Call it a wish list if you will. But after using this camera for about 6 months in a wide variety of situations, it’s pretty safe to say that the tool isn’t perfect. With the release of the D3x, I’ve come to realize that Nikon is advancing technology, but is clearly holding out for the next release to do anything drastic. I might/probably am too late to get into the D4 product cycle, but nonetheless…

What could be fixed for the Nikon D4

The D90 gets the OK button right. Why can

The OK button is useless. There are two ways to confirm a command in the menu system: hit OK, or hit the center of the 4-way dial. However, most things only require you to hit the ‘right’ button on the 4-way dial. The OK button, aside from being repetitive, is out of the wa I’d like to see a repeat of the D90′s solution. Replace the ‘push the center to confirm’ option of the 4-way control with the OK button. This reduces clutter and makes menu navigating a more one-handed operation.

Small ISO button

ISO input isn’t always visible. God love ‘em, Nikon has made the ISO on this camera kick-ass. I’ve got no problem instantly turning the D3 up to 3200 ISO. The issue is that I’ve got to take my eyes away from the viewfinder to do that. Oh, and I can’t see that change on the top LCD like I can see shutter speed and aperture. I’ve got to go down to the bottom LCD. Now, this sorta makes sense because the small *hinthint* ISO button is right next to the bottom LCD. But, use the camera for just a few hours, and reaching for that button is as intuitive as looking at the top LCD to see what setting you’re changing. Looking at the bottom LCD is not. The D4 oughta have a bigger ISO button and have changes visible on the top LCD — perhaps in addition to in the viewfinder would be fantastic. Movie mode. Yes, this is sorta cheating. No camera did movies when the D3 came out. But I fully expect video on the D4. It better. :) ← Now on the D3s!

Lack of pop-up flash to be a commander unit.

No i-TTL built in. Okay, I get it. Pop-up flashes suck. And the Japanese think it’s the mark of an amateur camera. Fine. I don’t need a pop-up flash. What I do want, is a built in iTTL commander unit. Like an SU-800 built in. It would mean not having to carry a flash unit just to be a commander. That slims down on weight and makes the camera less bulking during use.

Looks like the M setting is further apart right? It

The focus switch isn’t eyes free. Not a huge pet-peeve of mine; I can find the switch on the front of the camera to switch focus modes between Manual, Single, and Continuous pretty easily. Perhaps spacing out the settings (sorta like the markings would make you believe the switch is doing) so that we can feel when we go to manual.

credit: Moose Peterson

GPS. This is a really old technology now. Nikon’s even built it in to point and shoots. Why do we have to deal with this annoying dongle to get GPS on the high end cameras. Can we get something built in please? Even if the radio defaults to ‘off’ to save battery, it sure would be nice to have geo-tagging become standard meta-data that all cameras provide. (Let’s go EXIF, you can update!)

Face recognition and tracking. This one should be a no-brainer. Consumers like to take pictures of people, so Nikon et al has given them a focus mode that fines faces. The camera can then follow that face across the frame to keep it in focus and determine the correct exposure to make sure the people in the shot are what come out. What about this sounds like something professionals wouldn’t want?

The vertical grip needs a revamp. Maybe I hold my camera vertically more than other people do, but I’m sure the vertical grip isn’t as comfortable as the horizontal one. The big difference is the ridges on the bottom of the camera, which are meant to give some grip on a tripod head, and the back-end controls.

The ridges: Who uses a tripod head that’s the size of the entire base of the camera? Really? Isn’t it more important to have the grip be comfortable when you’re holding it — a far more frequent occurrence than putting it on a tripod — believe me. I’d like to some some texturing on the bottom, similar to the horizontal grip.
The controls: There’s an AF button nicely placed for vertical grip use. But there’s no AF/AE-L button. To use that functionality, you’ve got to use the one intended for the horizontal grip — impossible to do with one hand. (Oh, and while we’re here, that AF/AE-L button is quite a reach even on the horizontal grip, even for my large~ish hands.)

Seems like there might be some room for a bigger screen here :)

Bigger screen. OK, I’ve bought into the hype. Big screens are really cool. They let us actually examine the shot in the field — turns out that’s pretty valuable. I don’t know how much larger you can get the screen without cramping the buttons or the innards or the battery life, but … I promise to buy it a screen cover for Christmas!

Previews have compression!? Riddle me this batman: when you zoom into a RAW photo on the camera’s (very large-sized) screen, you see jpeg compression if you get too far in. I presume this is because the camera isn’t actually showing you the RAW file, but the jpeg preview embedded in the file. I’m not sure what amount of engineering is required to get around of this problem — I imagine a lot — but it sure is annoying to zoom in to check detail only to have it obfuscated by the compression. Don’t have a photo of this (yet)

Don’t up the megapixel count! Weird right? Don’t increase something? Coming from me? I understand this is a pretty controversial view, but I’m a photojournalist. I do my photography light-and-fast. Quite frankly, a 12MP file is just perfect for my needs. It gets me plenty of resolution, but doesn’t slow down my post-processing much. I just don’t have the storage space/processor cycles to deal with say… 24MP images of the D3x at the rate I need to work. If a photog wants more resolution, then the D4x/D3x is where to look. Instead, how about keeping the D4 below 14MP and putting the engineering effort into bumping the ISO performance again? Think about this folks: a camera that goes into boost mode after ISO 25,600. Now, that, would change my photography a lot more than a few megapixels.

ISO settings are confusing. Further on ISO: when the bottom LCD tells me that I’m on ISO “Hi 1.0”, I’ve got to stop a second and do the math — I’m actually at ISO 12,800. Why do you do this to me Nikon!? I just want to know the ISO! I get the fact that you want to emphasize we’re in “boost mode,” but on the huge back LCD that has tons of horizontal real estate, why are we conserving space? Can’t it read “12,800 boost.”

Small complaint about the menu system. Nikon’s menu system has gotten much better over the years, it’s mostly logical, and despite the expanded number of options, it’s still pretty easy to find what you want. That said, there’s one command that Nikon buries: time-lapse. This admittedly, infrequently used option, is placed with the play controls — under an entirely different portion of the menu from everything else like it. Could it hurt to put it in a more logical place?

How the D300 handles metering.

Switch to control the metering mode is in an odd place. I struggled to on wether to write this one up, because, I don’t find it to be a problem so much as an oddity. The switch to set the metering mode is located on the side of the prism, on the top of the camera. It’s an okay place to put it, because it’s something that’s infrequently fiddled with, but it’s not the only place Nikon’s ever put that control. Instead of hiding it away on a surface used by no other controls and requiring you to bring the camera down from eye-level to make an adjustment, why not do like the D300, and have a dial around the AE/AF-L button? It’s not quite as easy to switch modes due to the dial’s stiffness, but that’s alright; at least then metering could join the big boys on the back of the camera.

My laptop (same battery type) gives a percentage, most phones do as well.

A battery % meter. I gather the determining the actual % of charge a battery has remaining is a hard thing to do, prone to inaccuracy and a quick drop at the end of the charge. Nonetheless, we’ve seen it done often enough that it’s time for DSLRs to join up.

Built in dust reduction. The D700 has it. ‘nough said. ← Now on the D3s!

In camera VR. I promise, no puppies will die if Nikon caves and puts sensor-based VR inside the camera.

Thoughts?

I think, that’s my whole list of notes, any thoughts/annoyances of your own?

A quick note: The Nikon D3s has been released since the writing of this post. It does fix a few issues (video, dust reduction, and awesome ISO performance), but much of this article is still relevant.

Update: In the comments, pjadams brings up the point that the AF coverage area is smaller on the D3 than on the DX sized D300. It’s a good addition, not because 51 AF points don’t give us enough coverage, but because it sucks to have 3D AF tracking loose the subject when they get too close to the edge of the frame.

Rumor: The Nikon D4 might make a secret, gaffers-taped, appearance at the Vancouver Olympics.

Similar Posts: