Introducing Exercised

Like many people, I like to have an idea of whether I’m phsically active enough to maintain my health. I used to rely on my phone’s automatic step counting, with the well-known (and in my case aspirational) goal of 10,000 steps per day in mind.

However, when I went swimming – one of the more conscious efforts I’ve made to stay fit – my phone would never find out, sitting oblivious in a locker while I breathlessly flailed up and down the pool.

A smartwatch can be with you more of the time, but I’d have to remember to start recording a session before I begin, choose the type of activity, etc. Perhaps a watch might detect a swim automatically, but what about when I do archery? My device would think I’m mainly standing around for a couple of hours, when in fact I’m using about 3 times more energy than that. And all of this assumes that I’d even be willing to buy and wear a smartwatch in the first place, which, as it happens, I’m not.

In short, more comprehensive fitness tracking seems to make greater demands on your memory and your patience than I’m sure many of us are able to muster.

Designing Tachyo

There is no shortage of software metronomes in this world. I imagine that many people pick it as an exercise when learning to design or program, believing it to be a nice and simple task.

Yet despite this abundance of options, I didn’t find one that I was satisfied with. They all somehow missed the mark, not so much in terms of functionality, but in terms of usability and quality.

So I set out to create Tachyo, a new metronome for iOS. But getting there turned out to be an even deeper design and implementation challenge than I had anticipated.

Introducing Tachyo

Tachyo is a new metronome for iOS. It’s my first new app in 15 years, and also my first project after going fully independent earlier this year.

Now, you may ask if there aren’t already enough other metronome apps out there. There certainly are many. But, as is so often the case when I look for software, I haven’t found any of them to be quite satisfactory.

Beyond the obvious functional requirements (and my personal ones are actually quite basic), there are a number of usability and quality requirements that I think tend to get ignored.

Goodbye, Google. Hello, World!

When I joined Google in 2011, it felt like I was realising a dream. I had been working primarily as a software engineer, with my design activities limited to an unofficial portion of my job and to personal projects in my spare time. Google provided an opportunity to be a full-time interaction designer working with very clever people on widely used products, in a fairytale-like work environment.

But time changes things, including your perspective. In the last 12 years, Google got a lot bigger, making it a very different place to operate in. Also, not everything may turn out like in your dream – for instance, my field (UX) hasn’t developed into the rigorous, science-based discipline I had hoped it would. And, perhaps most significantly, I got to know myself better, learning what I enjoy and what frustrates or stresses me. So a new dream began to form.

Licensed 1.5.1

I’ve just published a minor update to Licensed, my free app for storing software licenses. It fixes a bug where the contents of the Notes field were not legible when using macOS’s dark mode. Download the latest version here. You can read more about the previous update to version 1.5 in this blog post.

Also, I now gratefully accept donations, in case you enjoy my free apps and would like to support me in developing more in the future (more news on that soon).

Tofu 3.0

Tofu started as an experiment 20 years ago. It was based on a hypothesis that long lines of text and vertical scrolling made it challenging to read on your computer. Arranging text in columns seemed like an elegant way to address both the movement and the line length.

I was amazed at how well the solution was received. Of all the apps I’ve made, Tofu has been the most popular. It’s also the one people missed the most after I announced in 2014 that I wasn’t planning to update it again, especially when the last version became incompatible with macOS releases beyond 10.14.

As requests for an update kept continuing even into 2023, I finally decided to update Tofu to run on modern Macs. I also took the opportunity to make many improvements to usability and layout, increase performance and fix bugs. The result is Tofu 3.0.

Licensed 1.5 (and Tofu news)

In 2014, I announced that I was not planning further development of my Mac and iOS apps. I have a couple of updates on that.

Licensed 1.5 now available

One thing I still intended to do was update Licensed, my Mac app for managing software licenses. That update is finally here. I’m sorry it took so long.

My main motivation was to add an export function, so that you could get your data into other tools such as a spreadsheet, and finally say goodbye to Licensed if you were still relying on it.

But it also turns out that technology moves on in 14 years (yes, that’s how long it’s been!), and the app couldn’t even run at all on recent versions of macOS. So that became the first problem to address. Licensed is now built to run on macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) through 13 (Ventura). This update also increases the chances that Licensed will work with future macOS versions.

5 years later…

UPDATE – 1 July 2023: Tofu is still alive, with version 3.0 now available, and Licensed got an update too.

Wow, that was longer between posts than I had intended.

Seriously, though, I'm sorry for the long silence, and for the lack of updates to my software. I'm going to tell you a bit about what's happening with my apps, my life and this blog.

So what’s been going on?

After many years of working mainly as a software engineer with a passion for design, I managed to fulfil my dream of becoming a full-time interaction designer in 2011 by joining Google. I moved from London to Switzerland to join their office in Zurich, where I live today.

Previously, my creative energy needed an outlet outside my job, which my free Mac and iOS apps provided. Since becoming a full-time designer, I feel that much less of my capacity has been available to put into extra-curricular projects.

Let me tell you my plan for each of my apps. There is a general theme of retirement, but I think these are the right decisions to make, and, as I explain at the end, I intend to direct my energy into efforts that I hope will be of more benefit.

Cambio

I never used to be particularly interested in designing mobile applications. I just thought it was a hopeless platform, plagued by tiny screens and keys that were designed for inputting numbers (how often do you actually type numbers into your phone?) I also had never thought of my phone as something that I want to use for various applications. This scepticism had become so ingrained that I initially didn't even see much point in Apple opening up the iPhone for third-party developers. I thought it might destroy the purity of this well-designed platform if developers were suddenly given reign over users' mobile screens.

However, two months ago or so, a certain curiosity, a thirst for a new challenge and a feeling that I was missing a boat (to where I did not know) combined to make me go out and buy an iPod touch (I don't want to buy an iPhone because my current phone deal is too good to give up). I almost immediately appreciated both what a well-designed platform it is and what a compelling playground the third-party application market represents, for users and developers alike.

Tofu 2.0.1

Tofu 2.0 was released yesterday, which allows reading simple PDF documents, has a less obtrusive full-screen mode, supports scrolling on MacBook trackpads and is a Universal Binary (that is, it includes a native build for Intel Macs). An alpha version with most of these features had been available for quite some time, but it had some bugs, and it only recently dawned on me how to solve the trackpad problem.

I have since released revision 2.0.1, which fixes some bugs in yesterday's release.

In case you don't know what Tofu is: it tries to make reading text on the screen more pleasant by wrapping it into columns, which you navigate from left to right without ever scrolling vertically.

Go and get it here.

Namely 2.5

Sorry to be late by a week or so, but there are several reasons why I didn't get a Leopard-compatible update to Namely out sooner.

First of all, I didn't have Leopard any earlier than most of you; I bought it on Friday the 26th of October at the Apple Store on Regent Street. That's because unlike many Mac developers who dedicate a lot more time to this stuff and who have an income from it, I don't have a Select membership with the Apple Developer Connection.

Secondly, I decided to try out Leopard's improved support for application launching through Spotlight before putting any effort into updating Namely. Ever since Scott Forstall had hinted at this feature at the World-Wide Developers' Conference in 2006, I had been feeling a bit anxious about Leopard rendering Namely redundant. (I generally think it's a good thing when Apple fills a gap that was identified and addressed by third-party developers, but nevertheless, we do tend to fall in love with our applications.) My verdict: Spotlight is not bad, but it didn't win me over. I didn't spend enough time with it to figure out how clever it is about choosing between candidate matches (it seems to at least take into account which app you chose last time), but long enough to find a few things that I didn't like about it:

1. A lot of stuff happens visually in the Spotlight menu, which distracts from your main task: quickly identifying the application you want to launch.
   
2. The icons of listed apps don't always appear straightaway.


3. It only shows three matches, so it's effectively a bit less tolerant.

I guess these things shouldn't be an issue if you only occasionally need an application that's not in your Dock. Finding it through Spotlight will still be much faster than navigating to it in the Finder. But I think that if you use Namely (or, for that matter, any other keyboard-based launcher) for most of your application launching, anything that isn't super-fast isn't fast enough. When I launch an application, I don't want to think much, and I don't want to see much. I just want to launch it. Although Namely's sorting isn't perfectly predictable because it adapts over time, it stabilises quickly enough so you can be pretty confident about what it will suggest when you type something.

The third reason for the delay is that I just wasn't sure what to release. I have been (slowly) working on Namely 3.0, which is controlled through a preference pane and doesn't show up in the Dock. So I was considering finishing that off rather than releasing another update to Namely 2.x. However, I wasn't confident that I could get Namely 3 finished and stable within a few days, so I decided to push out a minor update in the meantime.

Here it is. Annoyingly, I couldn't find a way to make it work on both 10.3.9/10.4 and 10.5 (I link against the 10.5 libraries in order to support Spaces, but this seems to stop Apple's secret application-listing function from working on 10.4), so I had to leave version 2.1 available as a separate download.

Web site redesign

I've just launched a redesign of my web site, which makes it the fifth version, if I recall correctly.

It's based on a simple grid with six columns of 100 pixels width and 20 pixels in between. Those are pretty much the same dimensions as I used for UIScape.com, and I've found them to work quite well: narrow enough to allow some flexibility and wide enough for most content. However, it only works if you have a very narrow sidebar. (With UIScape, I had to cheat by adding another 20 pixels on the right.)

I used to have a strange aversion to using non-white backgrounds, but this time I had a very particular look in mind, so I decided to just go for it. I was going to at least use PNGs with transparency for all the graphics, but too many people still use bloody Internet Explorer 6, so the background colour is fixed in the images.

This new site includes Google Analytics code for tracking statistics. I think this may be causing a delay when loading pages. I hope this is not too noticeable or at least not too bothersome for people. (Basically, I load and run the Google Analytics JavaScript at the start of the page, because I make in-page calls to it for tracking downloads and outbound links. If you know of a way around this, please let me know.)

UIScape

When I spent three months at Microsoft Research last year, I came across a lot of fascinating work related to interaction design. Colleagues would talk about their projects, people would report back from conferences, visitors came in to present their work, and I found things during literature reviews. Some of the designs I saw and read about were so cool that I couldn't believe they weren't more well known. Even my friends and I, who were supposed to be into design and human-computer interaction, hadn't heard about them. There was an obvious problem here.

I think the reason for this lack of dissemination is that the main way for researchers to make their ideas known is through conferences, journal articles and coffee-break chats. All three of these channels have only other researchers at the receiving end.

Most of the published literature is available online, but very often not free of charge. Researchers usually have access to relevant digital libraries through their employers, but designers and other potentially interested people are unlikely to be willing to pay.

Of course, many papers are available for free. However, a further barrier is that the format and language of scientific papers is not what non-researchers would consider an easy and engaging read. Given this "language barrier", as well as the prerequisite knowledge required for a lot of the material, you won't find many people casually reading the latest CHI conference proceedings on the train or flipping through a 20-page research study during their lunch break.

There is one web site which has addressed this same problem, albeit not for interaction design-related research. Ars Technica's Nobel Intent journal supplies those who have a casual interest in science with digests of interesting studies. These are written in a fairly casual style, usually include any necessary background knowledge, and only take a few minutes to read.

It didn't take much ingenuity to realise that such a model may be exactly what is needed to break the barrier that I had witnessed in human-computer interaction research. I got a few friends from university to join me in the effort to get something rolling. Well, after a few months of planning, designing, building and writing, the result is finally here:
http://uiscape.com

I sincerely hope you find it interesting and that it will help get many more people excited about the work that's going on out there.

If you have any questions about the concept or design of the site, you can comment here or email me.

Getting there

Prefling: The State of Affairs

Some people have been asking me whether there will be an Intel-compatible version of Prefling. Unfortunately, the answer looks to be no.

Prefling relies on a neat little library which was created by Brian Webster and accompanied by an article on Stepwise. This library provided the basis for most docklings that came out when these things had their glory days. Unfortunately, Brian is not planning to port his library to Intel. This is perfectly understandable. Docklings have been deprecated by Apple for a long time, and I’m one of the last developers to still use them. The API could be killed any day, most likely when the Dock gets an overhaul (perhaps in 10.5?). Also, the dockling server is a bit flaky anyway, sometimes stopping docklings from working until you log out and back in.

Most functionality offered by docklings can now be added to normal applications by controlling their icon and Dock menu. But there’s one thing that using an application doesn’t offer, and it’s precisely the essence of Prefling’s concept: that you can show its menu with a simple click. Applications require clicking and holding or control-clicking/right-clicking to show their menu.

The only alternative I can see would be to make Prefling a “menu extra”. However, I don’t feel that it’s worth the effort, since there are already two other such solutions out there: the aptly named MenuPrefs, which is already Intel-compatible but not free, and the also very aptly named PrefsMenu, which has not been ported yet. And anyway, what would I call mine, now that all the possible permutations of “menu” and “prefs” have been used?

So, dear fans, after 29,684 Versiontracker downloads (my record so far), it looks like this is the end of the road for Prefling. I’m glad you enjoyed it while it lasted.

Can you feel the pain?

What better way to launch a new product than with a promise of maximal pain?

Licensed offers a place to put [your software licenses], and because it does nothing else, it does it very well. Every effort was taken to make entering details as quick and painful as possible.

I guess I'm not paying £3400 on a course about what makes software hard to use for nothing; I hope you can feel the difference.

Debunking Myths about Student Life

Before I started my current MSc course, I was looking forward to the many pleasures commonly associated with student life: lots of time (or, in my case, lots of programming), lots of parties (or, in my case, lots of programming), etc.

How wrong I was! I could simply blame it on the workload, but I have to admit I don't really work that hard. No, it's the flexibility that really kills you.

When you're in a stable job, you can use your evenings and weekends as you please, you get real holidays, and you don't have to feel guilty about using those for non-work stuff. In fact, people will tell you off if you do use them for work stuff.

When you're a student, things are very different. Even during evenings, weekends and holidays, a cloud of guilt looms over you all the time, this feeling that you really should be reading some research article or text book. Even if you don't put in as many hours as in working life, you actually feel busier and more stressed because of this.

Thus I haven't been able to work nearly as much on my software as I was hoping to. I know, I know, it sounds like I'm just making excuses. But anyway, to make up for some of my creative absence, I put in a few hours to get Namely 2.0.3b1 ready for release. If you have an Intel Mac, please try this out and let me know if it works. If you don't, try it anyway.

Namely 2.0

Finished sooner than expected, Namely 2.0 is now ready for your launching pleasure. The most obvious change is that it has a new, customisable look. I spent many hours (literally) tweaking the matte and shiny shading algorithms and the different colour presets. I hope it caters for the majority of tastes.

It is also smarter about how it orders matches. It will keep track of how often you launch which apps, and will give more frequently used ones precedence in the list. The result should be that you can open many of your favourites with just a single letter.

There are other changes as well, so check out the Read Me file.

Got money lying around?

Although some kind people have offered me money for my software in the past, I never felt accepting it was quite justified, because I was full-time employed and only spent very little time on my products.

Well, starting today, I'll be accepting donations through a link at the top of my website. This is a) because I'm planning to spend more time on my software (within the constraints of my studies), and b) now that I'm a student, I don't mind the extra money so much.

As you may have already noticed, I've put up a pre-release version of Tofu 2.0 which includes PDF support. There are a number of other releases in the pipeline as well: Deep Notes is getting some interface enhancements, I'm looking to improve Namely, and there's a brand new CoreData app for storing software licenses, pending only a name and an icon (if you have an idea less boring than License Manager, let's hear it!)

Lots of pasta ahead

Apologies for the lack of activity on this blog recently. I do have a list of things I want to post about, but I've been so busy at work that when I get home, I just want to switch off and play Myth II, because my brain's too tired for anything more constructive.

The main reason I've been so busy is that I'll be leaving my current job at the end of September. Instead, I'll be studying for a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics at University College London's Interaction Centre.

Although it's a full-time course, I think that being a student will give me some more time to work on my software, post on this blog, and watch my bank balance dwindle.