The Apple iPad has polarized the tech industry in the past week. I’m amused by this development, not in the context of product innovation or what it could mean for web design and development, but for the culture of tech opinions.

There’s the half that believes the iPad is not the revolutionary new step in computing people having been waiting for, and then there’s the other half that thinks those critics are not the iPad’s target market. Considering how Steve Jobs began with his keynote about the iPhone is now dominating the mobile phone industry over veterans Nokia and Samsung, it certainly takes a lot to accept that the iPad might not enjoy the same fate. This short and sweet (which is rare) post by Jeff Lamarche puts things in perspective:

I’m sure somebody has told you all this before, but let me point it out again: it’s not always about you. Products can be successful even if they aren’t right for you.

[…] I’m a techie, but I don’t need to be able to program on every electronic device I own. I don’t hate my dishwasher because I can’t get to the command line. I don’t hate my DVD player because it runs a proprietary operating system. Sheesh.

But my beef with this is: hardly ever does that argument surface when not so popular, not so geek-worthy products surface. From what I’ve seen in tech culture, it’s so much easier to reject, even hate a product than even entertain the notion that it could succeed. In general, in a certain demographic, in a certain geographic region.

At times the word easier gets replaced by cooler. It’s cooler to hate stuff; that’s what techies are supposed do.

See how all the Apple or tech pundits are squeezing out the possibilities where the iPad could work wonders. Will it kill e-book readers? Will it revitalize the newspaper industry? Will it shake up processes in education, art, medicine, and business? Which function was it born to do?—as though it hasn’t been discovered only because Steve Jobs didn’t whisper the answer in their ears.

Is it because of passion for the brand? I would think other products may not deserve the same passion, but they do deserve a fair chance. Don’t hate a product just because it isn’t right for you.

Perhaps now there’s half of a crowd deciding people shouldn’t be so quick to judge, the tradition could change. Or it could not, because Apple is the exception to the rule.

Originally posted on February 2, 2010 @ 8:04 pm

In celebration of the iPad retail launch, Apple has created a gallery of iPad-ready websites that are said to embrace “the latest web standards—including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript”. That is, no Flash. You can even add your site to the gallery (scroll to the bottom).

Is Apple really opening up?

Let’s get the snark out of the way: a gallery, really? How novel. Right now there’s a vertical list (no Cover Flow?) of 20 top-tier websites. Will Apple really painstakingly update this list and add every possible HTML5/CSS3/JS-ready site submitted?

It’s a rare thing for Apple to lead a user-generated campaign like this but its best intentions are a thin veil over their real agenda—eliminating the competition and expanding further in the multimedia business. Does it really care about anything other than the big fish? What are the odds that the most humble of websites will even get into the gallery? Apple markets its products by partnering with the largest corporations that fit into its plans; I can’t imagine caring for the little guy in all of this.

This isn’t even in the same league as the iTunes app store—whose contents number in the hundreds of thousands—but could easily apply the profit-based and biased policies anyway. Not what I would call open or little guy friendly.

Is Apple a true web standards crusader?

Speaking of the app store: you can also develop specifically for the iPhone/iPod/iPad family using the SDK, but those apps don’t work in other devices. The mobile web is booming because of both the “web standards way” and the “mobile app” way, but how are device-specific apps any better than Flash apps (which happen to be cross-platform outside of Apple’s products)? Flipping off Flash when HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t ready isn’t a very responsible thing to do.

If Apple really wants to promote web standards, it should be doing a lot more with its resources to convert and educate people. The gallery is one thing, this documentation is another good step, but where are the resources for developing in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript? Partnerships with web standards groups like WaSP? Zeldman or one of the Super Friends speaking at the keynote?

If Apple really wants to promote web standards, see how it practically equates HTML5 with Flash-free media and nothing more. No oohs and ahs over CSS3’s text shadows and rounded corners or HTML5’s geolocation and <canvas>. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce the mainstream crowd to the wonders of these new technologies, yet all it’s pushing is anti-Flash propaganda.

One more thing…

Dear Apple, you’ve done a lot of groundbreaking things, but if you’re going to use web standards as a selling point for your most adjective-ridden product ever, you can do a hell of a lot better than an an anti-Flash gallery.

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Originally posted on April 4, 2010 @ 2:37 am

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with using social media like Twitter and Facebook to get people to participate in contests, but Cameron Moll’s nickname for the recent Authentic Jobs contest does raise an interesting point.

You won’t win through frivolous activities such as retweeting, posting a comment, or Facebookery. You’ll win by actually using Authentic Jobs in a way that benefits you. Use the site to set yourself up to find a job or land some freelance work anytime between now and December 4, and you’re automatically entered to win.

The contest makes its participants discover the product it’s promoting. Sure, retweeting and refacebooking to win prizes does spread the buzz, but if you’re confident enough in what you’ve built, it will do the talking. And so will its satisfied customers on Twitter and Facebook.

Plus, it helps to have fabulous prizes at stake.

Does your insanely brilliant product have to shun the marketing machines of Twitter and Facebook? Of course not. But you can always be a little more creative with your promotions, can’t you?

Originally posted on November 10, 2009 @ 6:33 am

Just about the time it’s become almost trivial to create rounded corners, Facebook suddenly decides to go back to its originally boxy, “razor cut” look. In the announcement, the Facebook design team reveals its priority:

Since we introduced rounded corners to Facebook, their consistent use has been spotty at best. The corner radii vary, and it sometimes feels arbitrary which corners are rounded and which are not. Additionally, they add an extra layer of complexity to the code (note: IE, please add support for border-radius).

As part of the effort to simplify our visual style, the design team recently decided to go back to our square corner roots. In doing so, we hope to champion cleanliness and the razor cut look that Facebook is known for.

That’s choosing consistency over the popular choice to go with rounded corners just because it’s a recommended design pattern. Not everybody would have the guts to do that.

Heck, it takes guts for Facebook to keep tweaking its interface, because at each turn it’s spurned so many protesting groups that keeping track of which one is against which feature becomes futile. For all we know, new groups protesting this rollback will surface yet again.

But Facebook always knows what it wants, it seems, and always sticks to its guns. Given the current design trends—from “Web 2.0” gradients, candy colors, large fonts, and rounded corners, to Apple-inspired interfaces, to the highly detailed grunge and Victorian textures—would you, as a hypothetical head of the Facebook design team, have come up with something like its current look? Or would you have changed it? Save for the already-gone rounded corners, people wouldn’t have pegged this site for a spawn of the Web 2.0 era. It didn’t feel the need to look like one. Its features already spoke volumes.

Let’s talk feature redesign. The most controversial one so far, which put the status updates on the homepage, has also redesigned the social networking design pattern as a whole. It’s not just a copycat of the Twitter or FriendFeed (which it just acquired) interface, but emergence of the Real Time Web had a lot to do with it.

Back in the glory days of MySpace and Friendster, Facebook had a chance to copy its ability to ultra-customize profiles with custom CSS and background images. And there was a time when FB’s apps messed up profiles that things almost looked as horrible as any MySpace or Friendster page, but Facebook once again swept in and prioritized consistency. Over total freedom.

Facebook always seems to be choosing the unpopular, unconventional path, but it’s now the most popular social network on the planet, and the 3rd most popular site in the world second only to Google and Yahoo! They must be doing something right.

Originally posted on September 3, 2009 @ 3:11 pm

IE6 Must Die, the title of Mashable’s latest post, hit the Twitter trending topics (it’s the new “Digg frontpage”) a few days ago. It’s really a good thing raise awareness for the browser we’ve been dying to get rid of for years now. But as much we should appreciate every little bit towards this goal, we should pay more attention as to why IE6 isn’t dead yet.

This Digg Blog post, Much Ado About IE6, sheds a good amount of light into that. Those who use IE6 to access Digg were also invited to answer a short, three-question survey that would hopefully reveal why they’re still using the outdated browser.

The results are thus: (a) More respondents used IE6 at work: a whopping 90% compared to 56% at home. (b) When asked why they don’t use another browser, majority say they can’t: either they don’t have sufficient computer access or workplace rights to do so, or the computer they’re using can’t handle modern browsers.

Granted, Digg is not a mainstream source of statistics. The amount of IE6 visitors are only at 10%, and more importantly, this social voting/bookmarking site has a strong geek slant. We can still learn from this unofficial study. As Mark Trammell concludes in the blog post:

Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.

How about we stop focusing on those who refuse to upgrade and try to help those who are simply unable to? All the campaign sites against IE6 don’t amount to much until they figure that out.

Just like the future of web typography means teaming up with the big-name font foundries to come up with a real solution to font embedding on web pages, eliminating IE6 would require reaching out to big businesses and convincing them to do large-scale upgrades in the workplace. On the Web, that’s already begun: we have the likes of Google and Facebook urging people to upgrade as they are dropping support for IE6.

But for non-technology companies, who’s going to reach out to them? Microsoft? W3C? WaSP? Assuming we found someone who will do the dirty deed, can they be convinced to drop a significant chunk of their market? Assuming the dirty doers manage that, can that significant chunk of their market be also convinced to stop accessing their sites using IE6, when in all probability they can’t? Should they be ignored?

The vicious cycle continues. (So much for freedom.)

Originally posted on July 21, 2009 @ 9:40 pm