The Inck Some-Times ~ Words on The Internet by Nicholas Hall

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Volume 11, Issue 1, Commit ~ Late Aughts Edition ~ Today was September 30th, 2012

Technology Irrelevant
- Apple Ford
  by Nicholas Hall on September 30th, 2012
  Since Steve Jobs died certain tech journalists haven't stopped asking what will become of Apple. Events like the iPhone 5 release predictably bring the questions to a robotic whine of rote, dim soothsaying. The fabled few years of ‘pipeline’ Jobs gave unto them shall sustain them short-term, sure, but what happens after that? How will they keep innovating, disrupting, innorupting?
  
  They won’t. And they don’t need to.
  
  Apple’s innovative, ‘disruptive’ genius may well have died with Steve Jobs. It was a great loss, personally more than anything. But Apple doesn’t live off innovation. Innovation isn’t a business model. (Everyone doing Internet startups please take note.) Innovation is a design practice, a way of making products with new technology, which isn’t necessarily the same as making money with it.
  
  Apple makes money on digital hardware, only made desirable by software and services. Given that our society has just lived through the emergence of the entire sphere of digital human production, they needed to innovate to create products, because they were many times making the first product of a kind that was any good. That was Steve's job. He could track, and sometimes lead, the emergence of said sphere of human digital production.
  
  I use that cumbersome phrase for lack of a better option. Because digital media isn’t an industry. It’s not of the industrial era. It is the next era.
  
  That’s obvious to many, and only important to say here because of what it says about Apple. To break out my SAT analogies, they are to the Information Age what Ford was to the Industrial Era. That may also be obvious to many, but is important here because of what it says about Apple’s relevance… continued with three Letters »

Writing Attends Features in Inck

writing	Apple Ford	Apps Bullshit	Facebook Microsoft	Inck Ink
	banner kerning problem	long article	old article	new sidebar
feature	Banner Type Kerning	Link to Skip Familiar Information	Non-Chronological A1 Layout	CSV Sidebar Parsing

- Apps Bullshit
  by Nicholas Hall on May 28th, 2012
  When I say ‘apps’ I mean two different things, both of them bullshit, but in two different ways.
  
  One, they are a technology, a bullshit technology in that it has not primarily been used to make a product better.
  
  Two, they are a marketing ploy, bullshit in the sense that all marketing is, a game of value signification played to help people part with their money. This kind of bullshit makes money, which is important to the continuation of our industry.
  
  To explain my first point, I’ll have to explain the technology. If you already know the technology, skip the next four paragraphs.
  
  Currently, the technology of most apps is ‘native’, as opposed to ‘web’. This is a very expensive distinction, and companies waste from tens of thousands to millions of dollars on native app development, often to be left with a product that serves their objectives worse than would have a web app.
  
  Native apps are full computer programs. They use the fundamental functions of the hardware to do whatever they do. They can therefore do any one thing as well as any other, from calculate missile trajectories to animate Angry Bird trajectories, from sequence genes to sell you jeans. But with flexibility comes complexity.
  
  Web apps are just web sites. They can be wrapped up in a single-purpose web browser that hides the address bar and various buttons. Without that stuff, the website becomes its own and only interface. The developer can put buttons, menus, whatever, in this web application, making it whatever kind of interface is best. It can look exactly the same as a native app.
  
  The difference then is that most of the work behind the web app is taken care of by the web browser. Browsers are incredibly capable applications themselves, allowing web developers to easily arrange and style interactive text, images, menus, buttons, forms, and other common elements. They have been designed and improved over the last decade by teams at Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others, all working together through an international standards body.
  
  If you think about it, all that we do most apps is look at and interact with text and images that have been made to look… continued with one Letter »
- Inck Ink
  by Nicholas Hall on July 25th, 2011
  Inck is an ongoing experiment in grid-based frontend development, databaseless content management, HTML5 and CSS3 techniques, whimsical layout, and the recombination of design, content and code.
  
  I write, design, and build Inck as one project, switching between writing code and words when I feel like it, or when a change to one suggests a change to the other.
  
  Inck’s ‘content management system’ consists of text files parsed for linebreaks and nothing else, formatted beyond that with HTML. The front page is configured with a simple list of articles, word counts for where to break them, an optional banner headline, an image embed, and CSV data to populate the sidebar, all in the file ‘a1’.
  
  Because everything is a file, everything--content and code--is managed through a version control system, originally Subversion and now Git.
  
  Because I have intertwined writing and coding, I've discarded the ambition… continued with one Letter »

Facebook Microsoft
by Nicholas Hall on May 29th, 2012
Facebook has taken on the role that Microsoft occupied for so many years. They are a dominant product that we have little choice in using if we want to take advantage of a new capacity, in this case the ambient social interactions offered by the concept of social networking. It's both a cause and symptom of this dominance that their product is inferior.

Facebook is a design failure in ways very similar to how Windows was. It obscures important features by attempting to give users access to a large number of unimportant features. It adds new features with neither a clear delineation of their interface nor a considered integration of them into the existing system. It mostly adds features that are transparently motivated by things other than user needs.

The overarching problem is that it concerns itself so much with features. Features of the site are the units by which it’s grown. This is as opposed to the holistic consideration of the needs of its users for a particular task.

The new Timeline design is some of the only work they’ve done showing a broad reconsideration of an aspect of the user’s experience, and it's still confusing. (Alternating content blocks left and right is smart, but the connecting thread in the center is too subtle to train users on such a novel representation of chronology. The life-long timeline is cool, but the data structures show through; after being born, I apparently 'moved' to my birthplace.)

Last year's redesign of their privacy configuration interface was a step in the right direction too, but mostly an afterthought, a Wizard walking you through a complicated process, rather than a simplification of the process.

(There’s a good argument to be made that Facebook’s privacy problem is not really about a philosophical or financial disinterest that they have in our privacy. They have in fact always had controls that allow a user to restrict their information in a very granular way, providing full privacy should a user configure it for that. But users don’t configure things. A good product makes its decisions for itself, presenting users only with what they truly need to decide. In this way Facebook undermines the privacy of its users through poor design.)

So if Facebook is Microsoft, then who is its Apple? Who is the innovative, principled product operation soldiering on at its feet, poised to overtake it at the next big shift? It's probably Twitter, but there may not be one clear champion yet, and instead a network of them, fittingly. Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, hopefully still Flickr, their ilk and their successors are building social behaviors into applications that have more focus on some kind of content creation or other activity. That will be necessary to survive the inevitable upheaval against social networking as a product, a formulation that will become more anachronistic as socially-networked features permeate more of our daily activities. At best Facebook would then become a… continued with five Letters »

The Inck Some-Times

The Weather

Technology Irrelevant

Apple Ford

Writing Attends Features in Inck

Apps Bullshit

Inck Ink

Facebook Microsoft