iMockups

Toronto-based Endloop has been making steady progress with iMockups. The overall look and feel of the UI hasn’t changed, putting most changes in the category of polishing and rounding out gaps driven by customer feedback. The approach is paying off, as I find iMockups increasingly easy to use, and it even has some features that I long for in other wireframing apps.

Far and away the most useful enhancement has been the ability add shapes to the canvas with a single tap. Once you experience that, going back to Omnigraffle to tap and then touch and drag a shape onto the canvas feels like going back to a rotary dial phone. Besides being way more usable, what jazzes me so much about this enhancement is the thinking behind it, which makes a more effective break from the mouse paradigm. I don’t think that same method of adding shapes would work on the desktop as well, it’s truly an interaction made for a tablet form factor.

Further enhancements around shape position alignment, guides, additional controls for adjusting shape properties, cloning and additional template shapes add up to a rapidly maturing product. Nice job, people of Endloop.

Where I get stuck with iMockups is not being able to take wireframes to the desktop for further work. While exporting to Balsamiq is supported, I’d really like to see Omnigraffle exporting for iMockups to really fit into my workflow. That aside, I do use iMockups once in a while to work on a concept, but only where the webpage elements are tried and true.

An area I’d like to see explored in iMockups is annotations to describe the actions around an interface element. That need may be moot if their roadmap includes, as I strongly suspect, a drive towards making its wireframes interactive for simulating the use of a design.

Still priced at $10 in the App Store, I can recommend iMockups more than ever for those middle-of-the-road needs, where the app or website you’re designing uses well-established design patterns.

OmniGraffle for iPad

I’m less forgiving with Omnigraffle for a few reasons: I use it more, it has a longer history behind it, and it cost 5x more than iMockups. Most of what follows will be griping about what Omnigraffle isn’t doing well on the iPad, but that speaks to how much it does and does quite well.

Comparing iMockups to Omnigraffle (OG to its friends) isn’t exactly comparing apples to oranges, but more like comparing oranges to super-oranges, or some kind of multi-fruit. OG has a much wider range of use and a far wider audience to satisfy. That said, even after several iterations there are gotchas that frustrate even casual use.

1. Two Common Actions in Hard to Reach Places

One aspect of OG that impressed me the most on first using it was how well it hid functionality until the moment you need it. The contrast between the number of controls that appear on the interface at any one time and the actual number of controls available still surprises me.

That rule of thumb goes too far, however, by tucking the delete function into the contextual pop-up menu. I seem to need delete a lot, maybe more than others, and having to do a tap with minor hold to invoke the pop-up menu makes the app feel slower than it is. Thankfully, the Undo button is in easy reach, a small grace I’m often grateful for.

In another case, one of the most common actions that I perform especially when starting a design from scratch is to duplicate and tweak shapes. Where iMockups has a Clone button to accomplish that, Omnigraffle opts for the traditional copy & paste routine. The other option of course is to drag another copy of a shape out of the stencil area, but repeated over many shapes that ends up being a lot of work, especially compared with iMockups. In performative terms, iMockups requires maybe a scroll and a single tap to add a shape, where OG needs a tap to invoke stencils, possibly more to get to the right shape, and then the drag out to the canvas. Touch-tone, rotary-dial.

2. Multi-Object Paste

OG boasts the most elegant and reliable means of selecting multiple objects on the canvas. The nice flow that sets up breaks, though, when pasting multiple objects, which are dropped un-selected (the desktop version keeps all pasted objects selected). Should your paste happen over top of existing objects that aren’t locked, good luck trying to untangle them. See above regarding the nice easy placement of that Undo button.

On its own that wouldn’t be so frustrating, but combined with the next item it becomes really unworkable.

3. Lack of Canvas Control

Omnigraffle’s canvas grows to hold the shapes that you drop on it. That means in order to get more space to work in, you need to drag some of your shapes to the edge. When the edge feels crowded, OG opens up more room to play. It’s a good idea, for the workspace to be responsive to the need, but the canvas is stingy in how much it will grow each time. This leads to repeatedly nudging a shape to the edge in order to get enough space to separate it from others around it.

Arg. And double Arg, when you realize that OG won’t let you zoom out the canvas far enough to drag a shape farther and to grow the canvas accordingly.

4. Fingers are Opaque

I can’t see under my finger, so I sometimes find resizing shapes tricky. That isn’t a problem unique to Omnigraffle, but it’s where I run into it the most on the iPad. I can imagine a future version of iOS providing a means of pulling a detail manipulation out from under the finger, as Apple did with the magnifying glass to position the text insertion point.

5. Stencils What-Now?

Currently I find myself using OG for little more than light sketching and gray-boxing starter wireframes that I then move to the desktop for expansion and refinement. The biggest roadblock to more in-depth wireframing is the lack of comprehensive custom stencil management and the dearth of modern stencils for software design. I mean, the UML stencil? Garrett IA? I don’t know how many years ago that so is, but it’s time for a refresh. I’m certain that OG could keep a lot of its lunch from being eaten by lower-priced players like iMockups with the addition of a solid modern UI stencil.

Like I say, I’m much harder on Omnigraffle because I expect more. That said, there have been some improvements, most notably in performance. As I wrote in the first review, I look at Omnigraffle for iPad as an investment in a long term development effort, and I’m happy to look over my bitch-list and see mostly things that are easy to address. With under-the-hood refinements taking the app a long way forward, careful study and iteration on the interactive flow of the app will steadily bring it up to par with the ease and flexibility of the desktop app.

But where the desktop app will never really catch up to its iPad counterpart is in Omnigraffle’s free sketch mode. I find myself in this part of the app more and more, and am interested to see freehand objects pivot into more normalized shapes with functions like line smoothing and straightening.

SketchyPad

With the incumbents addressed, let’s look at the new kid on the block: SketchyPad. Or, as it likes to be known on the iPad, Sketchy. The name could really use revisiting since you don’t sketch in the app at all, and there’s some serious namespace collision in the App Store.

Much like iMockups, SketchyPad is focussed on making interface wireframes. Also like iMockups, SketchyPad opts for the aesthetics of real-world materials. Where iMockups uses a wood panel in a non-ironic shade, Sketchy goes for the stitched-leather look… uh oh.

Interlude: On The Restoration Hardware Interface Movement

Hold on, SketchyPad, I’m gonna let you finish, but there’s something I gotta say.

While the “real materials” look in iMockups and SketchyPad are not my taste but tolerable, the leather treatment in Pages is far worse. Every time I notice it I feel the presence of a nameless silver fox in a smoking jacket, cigar and cognac in hand, telling me I’m in his Classics Reading Chair.

I blame Wil Shipley, creator of Delicious Library, not for embracing the real-world look of a wooden bookcase but for doing it so well that people thought they could just copy the idea and achieve the same sensibility. With rip after rip on the same idea, parts of the App Store begin to feel like shopping at Restoration Hardware.

Chair, or audio mixer app? You decide.

On the iPad too many developers, Apple included, are flogging the trope so hard they step outside the use of a metaphor and become set designers. Remember those absurd interfaces that tried to simulate a desk or a room, like MS Bob? Cue fireplace crackling in the corner and a golden retriever sleeping contentedly, because the App Store is bringing kitchy back, to some degree anyway.

App users of good taste, band together and say no to Restoration Hardware UI designs. End interlude.

Back to SketchyPad

SketchyPad is a competent take on wireframing and what you find inside is pretty much what it says on the tin. But there’s one place where Sketchy kicks the competition’s butt and takes its ice cream cone: shape selection, movement and resizing are incredibly smooth and responsive, so much so I wonder if it’s witchcraft. With other apps you tap to select a shape, then tap and drag to move it. SketchyPad makes selection and action work in a single gesture, which might sound like a small difference but it really makes its peers feel cumbersome and pokey.

SketchyPad is found with other similarly-named apps at cool price of $5, a total steal for an entry-level wireframing app.

Conclusion

So, which is the one wireframing app to rule them all? It really depends.

With SketchyPad and iMockups, an interface can be diagrammed to completion more easily, but it only really works when you’re doing stuff that ONLY uses well-established UI patterns. For interfaces that push the envelope in any way, you’ll want Omnigraffle for the flexibility, as well as the ability to move onto the desktop for in-depth design, richer functionality or simply more export options.

If you want to knock out some simple concepts with ease, iMockups and SketchyPad are the more affordable and nimble options. The lack of a modern UI stencil in Omnigraffle hobbles it in the comparison, and the price gap from $5 and $10 to $50 is hard to clear without a really good reason, and for me those reasons are flexibility and portability to the desktop.

That said, the evolution of wireframing on the iPad in just a few short months has been really encouraging. Apps like these make the platform feel much more mature than its few months than we could expect from any device on the market for just shy of six months, and that really makes you wonder and itch for the incredible things we’ll be seeing a year from now.

It’s like like panning for gold: lots of junk with only a couple nuggets that are, well, noteworthy. SimpleNote, which I fell in love with on the iPhone, dominates my text-only note-taking with its superb synching between iPhone, iPad and desktop (using JustNotes as the front-end). But for creative work I need something beyond plain text and with features that get into the iPad’s tablet groove.

After the jump you’ll find short and merciless reviews of seven apps, with the best ones saved for the end.

Ghostwriter Notes

$1.99. Rating: 1/5 [iTunes]

Ghostwriter is pretty awful, with one redeeming touch being the spatial approach to collecting separate notebooks on a home screen. After that, you’re sold an app with the word ‘writer’ in its name that only offers freehand drawing. The screenshots show some kind of trackpad feature where a writing space is magnified, something that I wish OmniGraffle had, but I couldn’t figure out how to activate it.

Inside a notebook it’s easy to get lost in the page navigation, and moving between pages is accompanied by a page-turn animation that’s slow and choppy. Ghostwriter breaks even the simplest of icon conventions, using the ‘write a new item’ icon for document sharing. Worst of all, the app doesn’t bother to auto-save your work, which misses something essential about what the iPad experience is supposed to provide.

Smart Notes

Currently unavailable due to update problems. Rating: 2/5 (for having some potential)

The Smart Notes demo screencasts I saw before its release made the app look like everything I could ask for. Actual use of the low-priced app told a very different story, one of an app stuffed with features but poorly thought out on the basics. Want to move something? Nope. How about undo? Nope. Auto-save? Nope.

Despite that, Smart Note is stuffed fuller than a Christmas turkey. There are a lot of ‘things’ you can drop onto a page, but without the basics covered, those features don’t bring the value they otherwise could. I think Smart Note can recover itself, but the developer needs to learn the folly of stuffing in a bunch of features because they sound cool while ignoring the basics. In other words, apps need to be about doing a few things well before doing a lot of anything.

Synotes Slate

$1.99. Rating: 0/5 [iTunes]

The epitome of an app trying to cash in on early arrival in the app store, but with little more than a shell to show for it. The feature set is impoverished, the interaction clumsy, and requires an account with the vendor where your notes will be synced even if you don’t want them to be. Of course, that account requirement isn’t advertised in the app description, making for a cute data grab.

A Notepad HD

$3.99 (on sale for .99 as of this writing). Rating: 3/5 [iTunes]

Things get a little better with A Notepad, despite buying into the atrocious HD naming meme that infects early iPad app names. It’s not much more than a decently-themed typing app with the ability to share notes via wifi. The strangest feature of the app has to be the startup screen, which gives instructions on how to use the app *every* time you start it up, rather than dropping you into the last-used note or at least an index. Again, we find no auto-save.

A Notepad does something very right: it doesn’t over-promise, and it doesn’t over-reach. The text-only aspect doesn’t work for me and the theme is heavier on black than I like, but I can see it working for some people.

PenUltimate

$2.99. Rating: 3/5 [iTunes]

PenUltimate is a something of a hipster app, having charmed the blogosphere with its stylish good looks. It doesn’t do much more than Ghostwriter, but it better and with a premium on aesthetics. My bad handwriting on the fixed-size pages limits the utility of the app, but if I could type in addition to drawing, this app could well win my note-taking heart.

Sketch Notes

$2.99. Rating: 3.5/5 [iTunes]

Handling both freehand drawing and typing, Sketch Notes comes close to what I’m looking for in a note-taking app. There’s a lot to like, especially with the well-laid out tool palettes and the ability to move sketches around after the fact. I expected to move blocks of text with the same ease, but this is only possible with cut and paste.

While I find a lot to like in Sketch Notes, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something is missing. It may be the lined paper format, or the feeling that drawing/writing mode toggles were placed too far away from the hand. Those quibbles aside, this app could, within one or two minor updates, become a real hit.

Mental Note for iPad

$2.99. Rating: 4/5 [iTunes]

Mental Note is among the best of the note-taking apps I’ve looked at so far, and has a solid place on my home screen as one of the apps I use the most. The feature set allows for freehand drawing, typing, and audio recording in-line. Audio is handled especially well, with recordings appearing in-line with text and drawings.

Mental Note isn’t perfect, though. It could use a more professional look as an alternate to the overplayed ’sketchy’ aesthetic (a problem shared by Sketch Notes), tool selection is pretty awful, requiring one to select through pen sizes and colours rather than choosing from popover palettes. PDF output is somewhat poor around page breaks, and the app could be smarter about using natural spacing in a note page to guess at where to put page breaks in the PDF export.

For my needs, Mental Note is the best app I’ve found so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing it improve over time.

Knowing where the table’s edges are make the experience of using a table possible. If you don’t know where it begins and ends, things will just fall off. Hold that thought, as I think it’s a good metaphor for exploring the point that content publisher brands have found themselves at, and the bets that they’re placing on the app-format being spun out of the emergence of the iPad.

Over the last 12+ years, the way we find and judge the value of information sources has changed quite a lot. Web-wide search engines make finding content an easy but mostly brand-less experience. Results are presented in the same format, no matter the query, and we satisfice with what lands near the top.

Gradually, web users traded the brand behind the content for the search result ranking as the marker of trustworthiness. I’ve come to think that phenomenon played a big part in bringing big content providers to the dire state they find themselves in, possibly more so than the reluctance to be ‘webby’ with their content, as the conventional wisdom goes.

The iPad as New Hope?

Content providers can’t avoid the web, but they’ve found fighting it a losing battle and the advice of ‘make it free’ digital optimists wanting, especially in the revenue department. So, more than a few of them are moving to double down on digital with custom-build iPad apps.

Some call out app-based content as an attempt to resurrect walled gardens. That might be so, but I see it as a deeper struggle re-establish awareness in readers about where a piece of content comes from, to re-cohere brand identity against the mush-making tide of search.

Like the table, apps provide an edge (or boundary if you like) that defines where the experience of that brand begins and ends. In short, apps are a chance for content brands to differentiate what they are and are not with a clear sense of inside and outside.

Some call out app-based content as an attempt to resurrect walled gardens. That might be so, but I see it as a deeper struggle re-establish awareness in readers about where a piece of content comes from, to re-cohere brand identity against the mush-making tide of search.

Edges don’t need to be walls. I sincerely hope content brands don’t fall back to pointing guns at their feet by neglecting good ways to share and build on the value they provide. Some will, and others will take this moment as a chance to evolve their brands beyond begging for pennies on ad-clicks, because that sure as hell isn’t working for them now. Can we blame them for trying to… well, find an edge?

Two early contenders have popped up in the App Store to meet that need and I’ve spent a few hours with each of them, with some mixed results that other iPad early adopters may find useful: Omnigraffle and iMockups.

The reviews here have been updated to reflect recent developments.

OmniGraffle for iPad

Before talking about the app itself, I have to pause and take in just how quickly Omni Group moved onto the iPad. Their decision to pause regular development in favour of porting OmniGraffle, a mature desktop app, to a new platform was surprising for a company that usually marches steadily and undistracted. It was also very good strategy: the prohibition of Flash and Adobe Air apps on the iPad takes the usual suspects of online diagramming, like Balsamiq and HotGloo, out of the picture (no pun, honest). It’s really a strange twist: a desktop product threatened by scores of upstart web-based products ends up on a hot new platform that just so happens to block those competitors. Ain’t life funny.

Overall the port is comprehensive and well thought out. After working through the basics – the welcome screen pictured above is actually a small tutorial – more advanced features like layers, multiple canvases and the full suite of inspectors, started to emerge. The core interactions that used to happen through the mouse and keyboard shortcuts have been re-thought to keep many of those interactions hidden until they need to be used. Omni has really followed the ‘look like a viewer, behave like an editor’ mantra that dominates Apple’s own iPad apps, but this doesn’t come without some usability overhead.

The kind of productivity that OmniGraffle invites us to do on the iPad shines some light on the difference between ‘doing stuff’ on the iPhone’s touch interface and ‘doing work’ on the iPad. On the latter I need to reveal some features quite frequently, especially the Edit popover with a tap+momentary hold. The difference between this action and tapping to select for resizing or moving is subtle, and I often find myself moving a shape when I want the Edit menu and vice versa.

By contrast, on the iPhone I very rarely invoke that menu and that menu is rarely competing with anything but selecting a text field, so mistakes are rare. Having said that I have found that a two-finger hold on an object makes moving and resizing possible in a single flow rather than a series of repeated taps and drags. Baby steps, but it does make me wonder whether Omni should consider providing keyboard invocation so that a series of actions like position nudging and unlocking or re-locking could flow together more nicely. I know, heresy unto the new age of touch, but it comes to mind using the app more than once. Let’s move on.

Beyond the good stuff, OmniGraffle for iPad still a very 1.0 release. Dragging and resizing shapes lags terribly even in small documents, and freehand drawing lags so much that it’s all but useless for now. Even text resizing lags; text! File transfer uses the clumsy one-way push provided via iTunes, which is a really poor substitute for the ‘working document’ lifecycle that Omnigraffle docs usually live. Again, baby steps.

The final hurdle, and maybe a fatal one for a lot of people, is the price: $50. Erica Sadun described the price as an investment and I have to agree. You don’t get all the return on your purchase at once, but you can plainly see that Omni Group is dead serious about making this work and it will be fun to see how they pull it off. While not perfect, OG on the iPad is the real deal, though you may want to wait for a couple updates before clicking down a cool fifty.

More info from Omni Group.

iMockups

I almost always cringe when a non-Apple product gets named as “i-something”, but iMockups gets a pass for doing quite well on its debut. Focussing strictly on interface wireframing, iMockups is planted well in the feature-range of those OmniGraffle competitors mentioned earlier who can’t make it to the party.

The potential of the app is found in its stencil, which provides a lineup of standard web interface elements, and a pop-up dialog to customize labels, which is a nice touch. In just a few minutes you can get put together a concept for a relatively simple web page, just enough to keep a conversation going or catch a good idea.

There is a real lack of polish when held up against OmniGraffle. Moving and selecting is sometimes hard, especially with smaller stencil elements like drop lists. I end up resizing when I try to move these smaller items. It makes me crazy and is the single biggest complaint I have about iMockups. A good if incomplete touch is the use of a popover to nudge a shape’s position or rename labels, but comes up short when wanting to change the position of a highlighted item in a navigation bar or tabbed panel. It’s good, but not great, and that gap hurts the product more than you’d think when you run into it.

The stencil is also locked down, so you won’t be adding your own shapes or making minor adjustments to any of the ones that iMockups includes. Sharing wireframes leads to a non-editable dead end with PDF or JPG exporting, but like many other aspects of the app, it’s serviceable and can get the job done.

And that’s where I think the sweet spot is for iMockups. It’s not OmniGraffle, doesn’t pretend to be, and ends up with a $10 price point that I think will do very well for its makers.

More info from endloop.ca

No Clear Winner, but Clearly Not a Tie

Both apps are currently on my iPad’s home screen for now, as they each have their strengths: iMockups does less but does it faster, while OmniGraffle does much more and is better suited to deeper or more complex wireframing exercises. I used the phrase Baby Steps a few times here, and it applies to both the making of apps for a platform that is new to real productivity uses, as well as to the learning curve inherent in moving off of almost 30 years of mouse and keyboard and into something new. With apps like these available so early, what we’ll see in a year or so will go far beyond.

…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

There are few people better informed and spoken than Cory when it comes to the problematic intersection of copyright law and digital rights. But his weekend rant foregoes a lot of logic and seems to seethe anger, something I’m not used to seeing in his writing. He even dips into the rhetorical war paint usually worn by the likes of Sarah Palin:

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers).

Complete with folksy language, he actually asserts that not caring about deep level access to the iPad means you’re against moms. (An f-bomb frothing Jeff Jarvis also employs this slimy framing, only bringing in Grandma to be his prop). Not too classy, but we say things when we’re angry.

You know, though, I also remember the CD ROM days. Oh, how fondly I recall guessing at video settings on a Windows 3.11 machine for hours to get movies to play. The child-like wonder in my eyes as I had the joy of tinkering forced onto me by trying to make something inadequate work as advertised. The good ol’ days.

Power Struggle

There are real reasons to revolt. The iPad isn't one of them

It’s too bad the post is smothered in Doctorow’s demands that the technology world follow his ideals, because buried in there are good points about re-sale rights of content. In the end I couldn’t stomach the underlying requirement of the self-annointed right to tinker:

That the vast majority of users must tolerate and adapt to the complexities required to give as much access as possible to the extreme minority who have the knowledge and skill to handle deep level access.

The spectacle of a rant turns to sad when we see how wrong these critics are: the iPad is hackable, but the catch is that you have to pass a skill-testing question called Jailbreaking. Early adopters passed this test within 24hrs of the iPad’s release this weekend. These people are truer hackers than those that Doctorow argues for, who seem to need a red carpet and latté waiting for them when they arrive. Maybe they will want to hack it, maybe not. The important thing is that Apple and its customers shoulder the cost for their opportunity to tinker.

Fantasy and Reality

When I read these iPad oh noes! posts I feel an echo of technology in the Star Wars movies: everything is exposed and always in a state of partial disassembly; doors snap open and closed with unforgiving speed, catwalks around control panels have no safety railings, and absolutely everything is open enough for R2 to hack into. I’m not sure I’d want to live in that world, though I love watching it.

Obi-Wan installs a camera driver

A technology made by a for-profit corporation is no place to look for champions of your political rights or ideals: that’s a recipe for ongoing frustration and disappointment. If he wants to really make the course of politics and law better, he should get into politics and law, and stop using the language of political rights as a proxy to getting his way with a product.

What I really hope Cory and others realize is that completely open technologies are not a zero-sum game. Apple has not taken away any hackable netbook, has not outlawed Linux and has not prevented anyone from coming up with alternatives to their tablet, which Android is poised to do at some point. I wonder if the real anger is that people actually like Apple’s decisions in this respect, and not the philosophical ideals that Cory and others take to heart.

Meanwhile, creativity and innovation seem the order of the day in the App Store, as demonstrated in a similarly fed up post by Giles Bowkett. But what I really look forward to seeing is people who have long felt alienated by computers and the geeks they need to save them, pick up something new and use it with ease. You know, the great experience, the one we all want to deliver. That’s the standard I’m aiming for and measuring by.

As with most interviews there are parts that get cut. While I liked the parts Spark included, one part I wished would have made it on was about the importance of the iPad’s adoption of unmediated input. The following is a tidied-up crib of those thoughts.

Hands On

If I had to sum up the iPad’s most significant break from generations-old assumptions about computing, it would have to be how the commitment to a touch interface kills the mouse and demotes the keyboard to a casual rather than primary conduit of our intentions.

The touch interface humanely places a premium on our hands as the best input devices; after all, they’re built right into our physical and cognitive existence at deep levels. An interaction model built for the natural range of our hands shortens the line between intention with action, releases the hands from limited, injury-causing positions, and lets them return to direct manipulation.

With the mouse and keyboard model, the hands manipulate proxies to the things we want to work with. We move a mouse to move a pointer to move a target symbol. In a completely touch-based model, the hands move the things we want to interact with. There’s no unfamiliarity with that idea, even for the most technically illiterate, piercing the assumptions of those who have avoided computers as being too hard for them to use.

—

I have a bad habit of writing about the iPad, but if you’d like to read more I can suggest three previous posts on Apple’s formula for blockbuster products, the trend towards managed platforms, and in predictions of what the tablet would be before it debuted.

Lots of techies are upset, seeing the future of making software as a Facebook experience: whitewashed, right angles and the turfing out of anything not deemed to fit by corporate interests.

How did that happen? There were plenty of chances to make things easy and for everyone, like the marketing copy we keep slapping onto our product descriptions. But we blew it.

When anyone could install any software, we never learned constraint. We couldn’t resist stuffing capability in over usability, to let go of options that only spoke to our peers, to reduce non-technical people to ‘users’. We dared everyone to climb higher while only a few of us knew how to land on our feet.

We wrote our tools first for each other, dismissing customer requests that didn’t interest us by saying they can customize with APIs or CSS or complex gestures, knowing full well most people couldn’t without our help. We hid poor quality behind clickthrough agreements, knowing that customers didn’t read them, and relieved ourselves of real responsibility.

Apple took the opposite approach: consumers can play, too, no matter their technical skill. The App Store approval process took over the chore of vetting the software’s trustworthiness because we did such a crap job of it ourselves. Think I’m exaggerating? Check out this result of the easy-breezy Android Store process: a rogue app that phished for banking info made it through. What techies lose in flexibility and direct access, the rest of the world gains in enjoyment, productivity and security.

As the disruption settles in, techies wear on their sleeves what fear of change really is, the fear of loss: loss of options, and loss of status as high priests. Techies have invested a sense of worth in a mastery of complex devices, and now The Normals will have the same capabilities. The barbarians are at the gates, ready to throw money at us for a better experience. And someone went and let them in. Those bastards.

Managed Platforms

The reconfiguration of the landscape that the iPad signals is a wakeup call to the tinkering bullshit that has mostly been product-making in software. What counts now isn’t capability, but reliability, polish, vision and professionalism. There are opportunities emerging to a much wider market than we’ve ever experienced, but we needed stronger lines to colour within to get there.

As we let others dictate the hardware environments we create within, we now have to accept that the software environments are also managed for us. This comes with advantages: we get access to the mobile data infrastructure, licensed content and massive resources like EC2 or S3. It’s a growing web of partnerships that defines the new environment.

We shouldn’t be surprised, really. We’ve been conceding control over our software environments since updates over the Internet became the norm. We implicitly accepted the new deal with every update we installed, and over time the temperature of the pool we all swim in changed without us noticing.

I call this new way of working Managed Platforms, where the platform is not released to developers but instead is actively managed with approval processes and other gatekeeping tools that create a policy-based buffer between code, hardware and people. The partnership between platforms like Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s application infrastructure and developers is a new relationship that doesn’t devalue developers. Why else make every iPhone app run on the iPad from day one, turning it from Apple’s content delivery device to a robust creation device under different rules? While they’re taking some of the keys back they’re also bringing us in to drink from the big revenue firehoses that only large companies could enjoy until now.

Jobs ended his name change announcement with Gretzky’s famous quote about skating not to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going. We now have a good idea of where the puck was headed, and how far ahead Apple was looking. How well we do as independent designers and developers in the era of managed platforms will depend on how far ahead we can look, and how well we skate.

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Photo by Engadget.