Cognitive Friction

In my last post, I threw the rattle out of the pram over my disappointing experience trying to buy an iPhone 3G on the day it was launched. As of today – almost a week later – I am still stuck with my crappy Sony Ericsson T630. Last Friday the O2 store said that they would call me when stock came in, perhaps by Tuesday. Well that was two days ago, so I made a few polite inquiries today. Here’s what I heard:

• A guy in Car Phone Warehouse told my friend that they expected a nationwide delivery of new stock in two weeks time, consisting of just 700 phones, which is exactly what they received at the 11th July launch.
• O2 and CPW are pissed off at Apple for oversupplying the States and starving the rest of us for stock. I don’t know, though, it’s unsurprising that Apple would look after the US first and let the rest of the world suffer any initial stock shortage.
• I called the O2 store where I placed my pre-order, and they expect some stock today or tomorrow. How many phones and what spec. they will receive they wouldn’t say. Those will go to whoever’s next on the preorder list.

So I may get lucky and get a call this evening or tomorrow, if my number comes up. After that, I’m on holiday and out of the country for most of the next two weeks, so I’ll have no choice but to wait until early August.

In the interim, I’ve been downloading some apps from the app store to my iPod Touch and having fun trying to sync OmniFocus across my Macs and the iPod. More about that experience in a later post.

Updates

Friday 8^th August: I got my iPhone! Read my first impressions.

Wednesday 6^th August: So I called into the O2 Store today and inquired about my iPhone. The staff told me that the waiting list had been cleared and that I should already have gotten a call to collect my phone. I had received no call. They checked the store room and found no phone waiting for pickup – I had somehow been overlooked. The staff took my details again and have promised to call as soon as they can source a phone for me. Bummer, but at least it’s getting fixed. I knew taking a holiday was a bad idea.

Friday 18^th July: I see that stock did arrive into the O2 retail stores yesterday and was used to clear pre-orders not yet filled. An O2 forum administrator posted this to the iPhone stock thread:

Some stock was made available yesterday for customers who had pre-ordered but not received a iPhone. Some more will be on the way soon.

So my number didn’t come up yet. I bet they try and call me next week when I’m on holiday, Sod’s Law says this will be so.

Science fiction author William Gibson said The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. The same could be said of Apple’s long awaited iPhone 3G, which launched last Friday. Although I had pre-ordered a phone at the start of the month, I came away empty handed.

iPhone 3G - still waiting

I turned up at O2’s Henry Street retail store at 8.00 am on the day of the launch. They normally open 9.30, but the O2 website publicized a 9.00 am opening. By 9.00, there was a line of about 20 people, including me and my colleague Ciarán but the store didn’t open until 9.35. The manager unlocked the door and stood there to advise people with no pre-order that they would not be getting phones today. I had heard on the grapevine earlier that morning that this store had exactly 11 models in stock, a report that proved spot on. Those levels of stock were typical in Irish stores: 10 phones here, 14 there. Pathetic.

At the counter, the assistant showed me her pre-order spreadsheet. It had 11 names at the top highlighted green – those getting a phone that morning – and about 20 names below that highlighted red. I was about halfway down the red list. No phone for me. I changed my pre-order to a 16 GB model and was told I might get my phone Tuesday, maybe, they’d give me a call. Folks with no pre-orders were told they’d have to wait two weeks, maybe more.

I was disappointed, naturally, I’d been waiting two weeks since I prudently pre-ordered my phone to pick it up on launch day, and took time off work to stand in line. Worse, folks who didn’t pre-order at all, but went to stand in line early at Car Phone Warehouse, were lucky enough to get their phone that day.

It’s not the end of the world, I know, but I feel Apple handled this launch really badly. The predictable but unmanaged server load, the resulting activation debacle, the poor levels of stock, all add up to a really bad user experience. In fact, I’d say Apple’s handling of this launch sucked, and to prove it I ran a poll over on the forums at the maccast.

9 out of...er...9 said the iPhone 3G launch sucked

As you can see above, most people (55% as of 14^th July) also reckon this launch sucked while a further 33% were less than happy. So what’s the fall out for Apple here? Probably nothing. Personally, I can’t wait to get my phone and will probably forget how much I griped about the launch as soon as I pick it up. Watch this space.

I spent a great deal of time in Omnigraffle this year and last writing Form and Behavior specifications for websites and web applications. These documents contain a lot of text and a lot of diagrams – site maps, wire frames, widgets and so on. I used to use Omnigraffle to produce the diagrams, then export them for use in MS Word or PowerPoint. As I got to know Omnigraffle better, I started using it to create the whole specification, using the presentation functionality to present the spec and outputting to PDF for printed copies. But it’s not perfect, and I have a short wish list for things I’d like to see in the next version that’d make my life easier.

1. Better text handling: Omnigraffle isn’t a text editor, but I’d really appreciate some improvements in how it handles text. Lists that work would be a good start. Lists don’t add new formatted lines as you write, probably because the application has no sense of styles attached to blocks of text. Lists are hard to find too. I was using Omnigraffle for over a year before I found the control for adding bulleted lists on the ruler. Not a good location for it. A better system for handling paragraph and heading styles would also be welcome, especially if it facilitated generating a table of contents.
2. Components: I find myself drawing the same toolbar, footer, widget or whatever again and again throughout a set of wireframes. Now the smart thing to do is to draw one example and then reuse it by pasting it into a layer on other wireframes. The problem is that when one link on a toolbar changes, you need to go through the whole document to effect the change everywhere. On some projects, that eats up a lot of time. I’d like to be able to designate certain groups as components, so that a change in one instance is automatically applied to all instances. That would make life a lot easier.
3. Richer actions: I wish Omnigraffle had a richer palette of actions. Currently, actions are essentially varieties of hyperlink, jumping you around between documents, canvases or URLs. It’d be great if Omnigraffle had actions that changed the properties of shapes, text and groups. This would enable me to simulate roll-overs and other application behaviours in clickable prototypes. Imagine if this were integrated with Applescript, so that we could script for simple behaviours in prototypes too. Sweet.
4. Better variables: The variables in Omnigraffle are a good start, but there aren’t enough and they aren’t flexible enough. There may be a way to change the format of the date variable, but I haven’t been able to figure it out. A really good set of variables would release the true potential of master pages – for me the model for master page and variable functionality is Adobe FrameMaker. I recall turning out some fantastic templates in that application that automated lots of the little fiddly bits on a page. I’d love that sort of power in Omnigraffle.

There you go, I told you the list was short. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has anything to add to this list. Finally, I know that Omnigraffle 5 is well on the road to release and I haven’t looked at the feature set yet. Now that I have written my wish list, I may go over and take a peek. Fingers crossed that I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Update

Just had a look over at the feature list on Omnigraffle 5 beta, and we have a few hits:

• “There is a new action in the Action Inspector to show, hide, or toggle visibility of any given number of layers.” This will enable simple animations simulating state changes without using multiple canvases. Not all that I had wished for but a very welcome addition and a good start.
• “Instead of using Master Canvases, OmniGraffle Professional 5 now has Shared Layers instead … Changes made to any shared layer dynamically propagate to all instances of the shared layer.” This looks like components, I’ll download the beta just to check this out. Woohoo!

Not on my wish list, but most welcome given that many of my colleagues are still stuck on WinDoze:

• “OmniGraffle Professional 5 now has a built in parser to convert the binary Visio file format (VSD) to XML for import. Visio stencils (VSS) and Visio templates (VST) are supported.”

This morning, I am bunking off work for a few hours to come and see Joel Spolsky’s talk on the Irish leg of his Fogbugz world tour. I’m looking forward to hearing a little more about the FogBugz product, although to be honest, I’m much more interested in hearing him talk about software process management and some of the other topics he covers on his blog and in his books. I considered live blogging the event, but it’s much more likely I’ll just post an update later on.

Update

So I enjoyed the FogBugz event, but not as much as I thought, and not in the way I thought I might. Here’s the story.

Joel started his demo of FogBugz 6.0 and did a great job of showing off the software. He seems like a nice guy, a good speaker with a good sense of humour. I have to admit that I didn’t know a lot about FogBugz, I last looked at it quite a few versions ago when I recall that it was not available as a service and available only on the Windows/IIS platform. It has come on leaps and bounds, and I have to say I was mightily impressed. Stand out features:

• The Wiki, for creating specifications in Fogbugz, with a very nicely done WYSIWYG editing bar.
• Evidence Based Scheduling, which enables you to calculate the probable ship date for individual developers based on past estimates. You have to see this work to see the benefits.
• The ability to take and post a screenshot with a bug report in a few clicks. Simple, but a real timesaving feature.

The best feature for me was, of course, the UI, which had some really nice features and fantastic attention to detail, for example:

• If you type Next Monday in a date field, it will resolve to a properly formatted calendar date.
• Switching to use the shortcut keys will overlay the appropriate keystroke on all of the buttons and links.
• Context awareness, exactly the right options are available to users depending on their task. The developers of this software clearly use it themselves.

So what was not to like? Well I was a little disappointed that the questions from the floor didn’t draw out Joel’s opinions on Software development and the industry in general. We did get a few fascinating anecdotes, such as why the MS Project development team don’t think it wise to use MS Project to plan and manage the development of the product; or why there are few true dependencies in a software development project, even though project management tools encourage users to create lots of them in Gantt Charts.

I could have asked a few questions myself, I suppose, but I felt a lot of pressure in the room to stay focused on questions about what FogBugz could or could not do. Maybe I was wrong, but that’s how it felt. There was a chance to talk to Joel and his business partner Michael after the demo, but I had to run off to a meeting with a client. Anyway, it was good to see Joel speak and to see what a great job Fog Creek has done with FogBugz, even if I didn’t get as much of Joel’s insight into the business of software as I would have liked.

Technorati Tags: Dublin, FogBugz, Joel Spolsky

This week I’ve noticed a couple of really nice products from web-based startups and I’ve spent way too much time watching video blogs, wishing I could afford to upgrade my iPod. I recommend you check out the following:

Pando makes sharing large files easy, and useful

I came across a story about Pando on TechCrunch and had to check this service out right away. This is essentially a P2P file sharing service designed to make it easy to share large files with others. Here’s how it works:

• You download a free software client, which is available for Mac or Windows.
• You drag large files or folders (up to 1 GB) that you want to share on to the Pando client.
• You send a small file attachment to the people you want to share the file with. This can be sent via email, some IM clients (Outlook and Yahoo IM), or through a link on a web page.
• When the recipients click the Pando attachment, the file starts downloading using Bittorent from your computer or the computers of others who have shared the same file.

The best thing is, download speeds are reported as high and it’s all completely free. I can see great applications for this in sharing large documents, prototypes and other work-related stuff with clients.

Blue Dot makes social bookmarking a compelling prospect

Up to now, I have found social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Technorati to be interesting but not compelling. That changed the moment I saw Scoble’s interview with the founders of Blue Dot. So what’s the big deal with Blue Dot?

For me, the big difference is that you can choose to share your bookmarks (dots, in Blue Dot parlance) only with selected groups of friends, family or colleagues. You can make certain dots public, of course, but the permission controls introduce realms of possibility beyond the public-only bookmarking other sites offer. For example, we have a Basecamp project at work called Knowledge Sharing, which we largely use to share bookmarks and related comments. I can see Blue Dot replacing much of this functionality. Check out Scoble’s video blog on this company, you will be sold. I am already planning to add some of their functionality to this blog.

Video blogs are eating up my precious spare time

It doesn’t seem too long since listening to podcasts became the predominant use for my iPod. I now listen to music only when I have no new podcasts available or when I’m working and need to zone out the office hubbub. Now video podcasts are taking up a lot of my time and I wish I had the money to upgrade my iPod to a video-capable model. There are three shows that I watch regularly now, all through iTunes, and if you haven’t seen them I can highly recommend them:

• The Scoble Show: Robert Scoble, former voice of Microsoft’s Channel 9, has joined Podtech and puts out a great show interviewing big names in the tech world. His latest show on Blue Dot is worth catching, and I hear he is interviewing Woz soon, which I am really looking forward to. You can subscribe to the Scobleshow through iTunes or from the Podtech web site.
• Rocketboom: If you haven’t come across Rocketboom’s quirky take on the world then you should definitely check it out. It’s just a three minute slot, so it’s not much of an investment of time and it’s often well worth the effort. Of course, it can cover topics I don’t care for, and produce the occasional lame-duck episode, but Joanne never fails to brighten my day. Rocketboom can be found on iTunes and on the Rocketboom web site.
• The Show, with Ze Frank: I just caught on to this show this week and like it a lot. Like Rocketboom, it’s a three minute slot with one man’s quirky take on the news and life in general. Ze Frank has a more acerbic approach and is likely to comment on more contentious issues than Rocketboom, which is all fine with me. Again you can catch Ze Frank on iTunes or on the Ze Frank web site.

This week I’m reading…

Why?, by Charles Tilly. This is a fascinating examination of the types of reasons people give for their actions in different social situations. Apart from being an interesting read in itself, it may prove useful in my work as it provides a taxonomy of reason giving that seems useful for that large part of my working life I spend trying to understand what people are doing, and why. I’m just a third of the way through the book at present, but I’d already recommend it.