turbodingo

That was a few days ago. Since then, things have been much better. I chose a different, simpler operating system to be the new foundation. This one has less razzle-dazzle, fewer wizards, and less name recognition than Ubuntu Linux, which some of you may think has none of those things. I chose it because I expect it to be quick and to “just work” — that is, get out of the way and let me get things done.

DIGRESSION:

As an example, here is a comparison of music player interfaces, before and after:

On the left is what I used before. It’s another instance of an iTunes-inspired approach for browsing, selecting, and queuing music. It navigates a lot of metadata about the music files. Working with this interface, I would hunt-and-click all over the place to eventually play the songs I wanted. In this image (not from me), the entire collection is visible and it has been scrolled down past the Enya section to select a song by Frank Sinatra, which has been selected to play.

The new approach is much simpler: on the right is a text entry box where I type the command “plait” and then some hints about what I want to hear. Similar to before, the listener wants to hear Frank Sinatra. It’s smart enough to deal with word fragments, and to search across all the obvious metadata without me telling it to look at artist names. It can also play an Internet radio stream, eg. “plait -s kcrw” would find the shoutcast streams from KCRW. You don’t need to speak French to see the pleasure in this application’s interface simplicity.

The example above neatly describes two fundamentally different modes that come up in computer applications: browse vs search. Yahoo and Google represent each side. While one says “Check out all the stuff we’ve got for you here!” the other asks “What do you want?” Each approach has good reason to exist in the world of user interfaces, and it’s important to choose the proper one for the task. In the case of playing music, the search-style interface of plait works best for me. However, others may not know ahead of time which music they want, and a browse experience will guide them through the available options. Guidance is the key concept: there can be too much or too little — and it depends on the customer. If you know you want to hear a specific song, it sucks trying to browse to it with the iPod’s scroll wheel. What was once a wonderful way to interact with the music becomes a chore.

Did I need to reinstall the operating system to use this new interface? No, I could have installed it on the old system. But remember, that old system had trouble playing sound for more than a few minutes, and a few other critical problems. Adding a new music interface to a broken foundation would not make sense- I needed to wipe the slate clean, ask myself what kind of behavior I wanted from a new system, and then put together the components for it. And making a major change seemed appropriate: my idea of what I want from the computer has changed since the time I installed the old system. I am more familiar with the way things work, and don’t need as much guidance to do my work.