Cognitive Friction

I’ve had the iPhone 3G for about two weeks now, and patterns of use are starting to emerge, apart from the obvious: making calls, sending texts and checking email. Although, even here, buying the phone has led to some changes. For example, I made an effort to rationalise, synchronise and update the contacts in the address books on the two Macs I use regularly.

NetNewsWire sees heavy use on my commute and in any downtime during the day. The associated Newsgator service keeps my read/unread feeds synchronised on two macs and the iPhone. The upside of this is that I’m ready to start work when I get to my desk, aside from getting a coffee that is, whereas previously the first thing I’d do was to scan all of my news feeds. If I come across a story I want to come back to in NetNewsWire, I can’t flag it on the phone, so I’ve been emailing the link to myself, and that seems to work fine.

I’m updating Facebook and Twitter more often than previously, and I’ve even started uploading images to Facebook from the iPhone camera. I have been making a lot of use of Evernote and the camera to photograph the covers of books I want to buy later. Evernote makes the text of the book cover images searchable, but I have created a notebook called ‘Stuff to buy’ that I upload these images to, so they’re all in one place anyway.

It’s not all rosy, though, as I’m damned if I can get OmniFocus desktop and OmniFocus for the iPhone to sync. I did have all of this working through WebDav on the BingoDisk service, but an update a few weeks ago broke it somehow. OmniFocus desktop crashes frequently when syncing or when you run software update and the iPhone app gets locked in a cycle of asking for your login details when you try to sync. The desktop app is still a beta release, so I’ll be patient, but they are clearly having trouble getting this to work with the many and varied WebDav services that are out in the wild.

The lack of cut and paste on the iPhone is a pain. Enough said.

I’ve added a few new apps lately: Pennies, to try and stick to a budget; DataCase, which should have been built into the iPhone software and 1Password. I got 1Password in the MacHeist bundle back in January and never used it, but I put all of my stuff in there recently and have found it a real boon given the number of sites I visit that require login. They’re launching a sync service too, so your passwords can be stored in the cloud, encrypted, and accessible from wherever as well as synchronised between machines. I may have a look at that soon, I’m reviewing all of the various applications and services I use (or subscribe to and don’t use) in an effort to tidy up the worst excesses of my curious mind.

Finally, after much shopping around, I’ve decided to go with Zagg’s invisibleSHIELD for iPhone 3G rather than buy a case for the iPhone. I’ve ordered it already, though I must say I am not looking forward to fitting it to the phone. Still, it comes recommended (and with a discount code from a friend), and the demo video on the product page is impressive. I have two discount codes for this product to share with anyone who wants them, drop me a line and I’ll forward a code to whoever asks first.

I came across Jeff Gomez’ book Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age while browsing through Hodges Figgis the other day. I couldn’t help but savour the irony that Gomez’ work came as a rather large chunk of dead tree. Reports of the death of print are frequent and often wildly exaggerated.

Print is Dead? Not yet, apparently.

To be fair to Gomez, his book is also available in electronic format. But, I find ebooks insultingly overpriced, I don’t have an ebook reader, I wouldn’t buy one just to read a single book, and I don’t want another device to hump around, recharge and synchronise. That’s the problem for eBooks in a nutshell.

Having said that, a quick flick through this book in the bookshop and a brief wander around Gomez’ blog makes me think that he might have something intelligent to say on this topic. And there are undoubted shifts in the print industry – most apparent in the newspaper and periodical business at the moment. Perhaps ebooks are an example of the sort of change that Larry Keeley famously characterised: We always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and we underestimate the amount of change in the long term. I may give this book a go when my current book pile shrinks a bit.

I finally got my iPhone 3G. I picked it up two days ago and it’s a white 16 GB model. So after all of the agonising I did over the wait, was it worth it? I think so. Here are my first impressions.

More storage is better

Well the first thing I have to say is that I am glad I got the 16 GB model. I read one forum comment from a guy who wondered why anyone would want all of the space on the 16 GB iPhone, which reminded me of that spurious Bill Gates quote that 640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody. Give us the memory and see what people do with it.

I have about 5.5 GB of music and other audio files in iTunes, which took up too much space on my 8 GB iPod Touch. With the 16 GB iPhone, I have ample space for all of that audio, plus video, photos and other data. Currently I’m using about 9 GB of the available space. I can see why the 8 GB model is less popular. If there had been a 32 GB iPhone 3G I’d have bought that, and I’m sure this can’t be too far away on Apple’s iPhone roadmap.

Using the phone

I love the phone functions so far – making and receiving calls is a breeze and the sound quality is first rate. I have suffered a Sony Ericsson T630 for several years now, waiting to replace it with a device just like the iPhone 3G. That phone was one of the most unusable devices I have ever owned, so using the iPhone feels like liberation from an occupying power.

Contacts and Favourites on the iPhone are great to use and the SMS interface is excellent. I haven’t been able to use the visual voicemail, which O2 does not offer in Ireland, but I understand that’s on the way by the end of this year. I’d say that one day, all phones will be made this way, except that it seems redundant to say so. Anyone can see that Samsung, Nokia and the rest are busy getting iClones onto the market as fast as Korean factories can turn them out.

The iPhone as software platform

The iPhone 3G isn’t just a phone. If it was, I may not have bought it, Apple fanboy though I am. No, this is the mobile computing device that I have longed for ever since my Palm III died back in 2000. It wraps my phone into the much more important hand-held computer I want and it doesn’t come with a relentless focus on the Enterprise and Exchange server, which every other likely candidate phone in the past 7 years has been saddled with. The iPhone does that stuff, but isn’t married to it, which suits me just fine.

So far, I have downloaded the following apps from the App Store:

• Twitterific – the free version.
• Wordpress – which might induce me to post more often.
• Omnifocus – a nightmare to get WebDav sync working, and almost useless until Omni Group release a stable version of OmniFocus 1.1.
• Evernote – which will be great when the bugs get fixed.
• NetNewsWire – RSS feeds on the bus, Yay!
• Super Monkey Ball – why not?
• Comic Touch – gotta love the guys at Plasq.

And this doesn’t touch on the mail app, bookmarked iPhone enabled sites that I use a lot and all of that good stuff. I can see myself leaving my Laptop behind more, as I often bring it just for mail and other communication channels.

Battery life and other impressions

When using 3G, the battery does get drained in a manner that reminds me of my 4 year old polishing off his orange juice with a straw. But then, I have the phone plugged in to my computer most of the time in the office and at home, so it hasn’t been a problem as yet. I can see that it might be problematic when traveling.

There are also lots of little habits that I need to change now that my iPod and phone are one and the same device. I used to wrap the headphone cord around my iPod touch, but I can’t do that with the iPhone as it needs to be ready for immediate use if a call comes in. So yesterday, I left the headphones with the mic on my desk and went off site – no podcasts or music on the commute home as a result.

I’ve just been carrying the iPhone around in my pocket, and I’ve been thinking about getting a case. Most of the cases on the Apple store that have received good reviews are out of stock, with 2-4 weeks listed for delivery. I’m not sure whether to buy something I’m not sure of or to wait and see what gets released in the second wave of case designs. If anyone has a recommendation, I’d be happy to hear it.

The GPS is fun, and may prove useful to me yet. This morning, I enjoyed tracking the progress of my bus along the Chapelizod bypass on Google maps. Useless, but nerdy fun. I can see myself using it for directions – I used to print out google maps before I left the office for a meeting, now I can do that on the way and see where I am in relation to my destination. Sweet.

So my first impressions are very positive, and it seems well worth the wait. I’ll try to blog again after I’ve lived with the thing for a few more weeks and see how it’s going then. But right now, using the iPhone feels a lot like holding a piece of the future, and I can’t see how I could go back to a less capable, less beautifully designed device.

I have noticed a couple of interesting developments at two of the leading companies in the user experience design field: Cooper and Adaptive Path. Both companies seem to be taking a decisive step into the wider design territory occupied by companies such as Ideo and Frog Design.

On July 9th, Adaptive Path announced that they had selected Michael W. Meyer, a former executive at both Ideo and Frog Design, as their new CEO. About the same time, Dan Saffer started blogging about physical computing and his experience of learning electronics. In his first post, he says:

Over the last several years, Adaptive Path’s business has expanded from mostly web work to a mix of web, mobile, medical devices, and consumer electronics.

Interesting. The second thing that got my attention was that Cooper made an appointment on July 14th, making Michael Voege, also from Frog Design, their Director of Industrial Design. Making the anouncement, Dave Cronin at Cooper said:

Some of the most exciting and challenging products we’ve designed here at Cooper have involved a physical component. We admit it, we’re greedy: we want to do more fun projects like that.

So what? Well I think this marks a sea change in the field of user experience design. I have long admired Ideo’s work and wondered what the difference was between what I did for a living and what the people at Ideo did. The answer seemed to be simply that I designed for software, a material with no physical properties, whereas at Ideo they designed both the software and the hardware. I’m sure that at Cooper and Adaptive Path, people have been looking at the iPhone and at Microsoft’s Surface and have been thinking that these types of physical computing devices with complex behaviours and innovative interfaces are where all of the interesting future action will be in our field. They are positioning themselves to take advantage of these kinds of opportunities. Now that’s the sort of move I wish I was making myself.