Geek Morality

The most rigid moralists in the world today are not religious leaders or conservative politicians. They are the computer geeks, especially the ones who have been using computers and the Internet for 10 or 20 years (or more!!)

They have rules for everything. For example, nice looking formatted email is bad. Email has to be plain text, looking like it just rolled out of your typewriter. (Google it if you don't know what that is.)

Email should look like this:		Not like this:
Hey, Max. Want to grab lunch? I was thinking either Changsho or Mary Chung. What say?		Hey, Max. Want to grab lunch? I was thinking of either: Changsho, or Mary Chung What do you say?

And email with pictures?  Horror!

Also, when you reply to an email, you may not top-post (put your reply above the excerpt from the message you're replying to). This is a grave sin among knowledgeable geeks. Email has to read from top to bottom in chronological order, like some ancient scroll.

Using Flash to liven up a Web site is strictly taboo.  Web sites should also look like typewritten documents.  Except for the links.  Those can be blue.

But the worst sin of all is usability. Usability may mean more people can actually benefit from the technology, but it's always at the expense of performance. Nice looking Web pages take longer to download.  Understandable commands take longer to type. Worst of all, usability means that practically anybody could be on the Internet. Even non-geeks!

The Bond Market

Goldfinger is one of the better James Bond movies.¹ To aid in the assault on Goldfinger's headquarters, Her Majesty's Secret Service issues Bond a sports car, an Aston Martin DB5, with a slew of special gadgets and features. These include: a slide-up rear bullet-proof shield, front-mounted machine guns and rear-mounted smoke screen, oil sprayers and nail spreaders to thwart pursuers. The pièce de résistance is an ejection seat to launch unwelcome passengers through the roof of the car.

Bond uses every one of these gadgets in a single 5-minute chase scene during the movie. But despite all this high-tech weaponry, he's captured anyway! That's because the British Secret Service's gadget group, headed by Q, has designed and built the whole thing without doing any user studies.

As presented in the Bond films, Q and his department dream up all kinds of exotic weaponry, and then build it and test it in the lab on wooden dummies, ersatz espionage agents and pseudo-supervillains. Then these gadgets are issued to field agents like James Bond, with no more instruction than a quick demo. The agents are expected to rely on this equipment in life-threatening situations. It's no wonder Bond always has to fall back on his sex appeal in a pinch.

A more effective head, lets call him R, would have field agents involved from the concept stage. Bond and his colleagues would be specifying what devices they need, and how they should work. R would then bring the agents back in for prototype testing, which might require multiple iterations. Only when these gizmos have been thoroughly tested and approved would they be put to work in real assignments.

Then maybe 007 wouldn't wind up strapped to a table with a laser beam aimed at his groin.

¹From Russia With Love is the best one.

Quickie on Safari 4 beta

Ok, Safari 4 looks pretty good speed wise, and the new tab cover flip behavior is sexy looking, if not altogether helpful. But there's some some downright bad news too.

1. The top tabs are potentially dangerous. Drag a tab in the wrong place, and you move the whole window. To re-order the tabs, you have to grab the active tab by it's little "tread" triangle in the upper right corner of the tab. Annoying. I realize Safari is trying to be a Chrome clone here, but it doesn't work.
   
2. The tab-ordering tread and the little close-this-tab-X-thingie don't appear until you actually move the pointer into the tab. That means you can't simply go grab the tab. You have to go to the tab, stop and look, and then do whatever you're going to do. I've only had the beta for a week or so, and already I've closed tabs inadvertently more times than I can remember.
3. Can we please put the damn bookmarks in a bar on the left side, like every other frigging browser in the world? PLEASE? Even with the tabs above the URL box, and the bookmarks below it, it's still far to easy to hit a bookmark when reaching for a tab. And they're visually confusing.
   

C'mon folks! This is UI Design 101 stuff. Besides, I've got all these full-wide-screen windows, and even GMail has a limit to how many columns of junk I can display side-by-side.

I'm not alone in this. Yan Pritzger agrees with me.

Whew. Ok, I'm done now.