I’m getting software

I am reading quite a number of RSS feeds, and I am spending some hours offline every week when I am on a plane. With Google Reader and the Byline iPhone application I have found a way of utilizing this offline time with reading. I can download up to 200 articles to be read while offline, the read/unread state of my iPhone reader is synchronized with Google Reader when I come back online and continue to read it on the web version of Google Reader (enhanced by Helvetireader ). Articles that are interesting for me or require further action (like forwarding, or writing a blog post) will be starred (keyboard shortcut: S) in either Byline or Google Reader. With this I created my stack of "to-read" articles.

Click here to download:

html5flash-screencast.mov (3150 KB)

There has been some discussion lately on the best way of implementing HTML5 video. Laura Thomson started the discussion by describing for using HTML5 video with fallbacks to other formats. Laura's solution consists of detecting the availability of HTML5 video using Javascript. If this tag exists, it will be inserted dynamically into the page, if not, a Flash-based fallback will be added.

I have been invited to participate in Kas Thomas latest meme, the invitation comes specifically from Irina. I wanted to answer somewhen, but seing Bertrand's answer today who was tagged together with me was pushing me to write this post. So here are the then things you might not know about me:

A book review about a book explaining the basics of visual interface design would be nothing notable except that my more thorough readers might say: "Lars, you cannot write a review about a book that is more than ten years old and long out of print." Well, in this blog I have been describing how to design lock-in effects, propagated copying features, invoked The Beatles at least twice and referred to Zombies, so I guess I can.

Designing Visual Interfaces, by Kevin Mullet and Darell Sano, subtitled "Communication Oriented Techniques", was written in 1994, when Netscape was rocking the software world and Sun was still a powerful company and not an acquisition target for IBM. The concepts explained in this book that form the main chapters are elegance and simplicity, scale, contrast and proportion, organization and visual structure, module and program, image and representation, and style are indeed timeless and apply to graphic design as much as to visual interface design. Each chapter is using positive examples abundantly, following the philosophy that becoming a good designer needs first and foremost experience, which can be gained by exposure to works of great design. Additionally there is a section in almost every chapter that highlights the most common mistakes.

As I wrote, the books subject is timeless and not bound to any specific user interface technology, which is illustrated by the examples that are being used throughout the book. Applications and operating like Ami Pro, Windows 3.0, NextStep, Aldus Freehand that are being used as examples in the book might be long gone (or evolved into Windows Vista, Mac OS X Leopard, Adobe Freehand, but the principles that made the user interfaces of these applications exemplary in any sense still apply.

Aside from being reminded of software legacy and the word processor that taught me there were serious uses of computers, the illustrations and examples used in the book serve well to explain the concepts mentioned. On the one hand, visual design was not that prevalent, so that you could find really awkward user interfaces without going to obscure shareware applications, but also in mainstream software such as the Mac OS control panel. On the other hand with simple black-and-white displays and basic user interface toolkits, application developers could not use eye-candy to distract from the underlying weaknesses of their dialogs.

I do not spend as much time reading books as I would like to, but the time invested in this book was surely well spent and I can recommend it to anyone who is looking to understand the basics of visual interface design without having to rely on a cookbook or guideline approach. For readers with a bit of background in using different operating systems, it will be interesting to see how evolutionary lines in the software phenotype can be traced for example from Mac OS to Newton OS to Palm OS or from Mac OS to NextSTEP to Mac OS X.

People writing about software love this word: 'cloning'. Friendfeed's new beta allegedly cloned Twitter's activity feeds feature, but Facebook allegedly cloned Friendfeed's aggregation feature earlier . I do not like the notion of cloning or copying a feature, because the metaphor is utterly inaccurate.

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With the latest MacHeist I got a license to Delicious Library 2. I played with the program for about an hour and indeed, it is beautifully designed, the Delicious Monster team clearly popularized the shelf metaphor (and perhaps inspired to the wooden background in the Byline iPhone application, where it makes a lot less sense). The iSight scanning support is marvelous. For one, combined with the automatic Amazon search, it allows for a very fast library building. I managed to import 160 books in one hour, and some of them were German books without barcode, or out of print, so I had to resort to typing the name and author of the book.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Did you know that there is a Beatles song about the Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Apple's iTunes? Of course, there is not, but there is a song about the lock-in effect. The song is called Chains and appeared first on the Please Please Me album. Listen for yourself.

If you do not have the time to watch the video, this is the crux of the lyrics:

Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains.

And they ain't the kind that you can see.

Whoa, oh, these chains of love got a hold on me, yeah

Software companies love their customers so much that they would like to keep them forever, so they try to lock them in. The best lock-in effect leaves the customer of the software in a situation that keeps uses chains of "the kind that you can [not] see" and make the lock-in appear as "chains of love".

The best time to attempt creating a lock-in effect is when your new product is having maximum market impact and growth. The reason is that at this time you will have most goodwill in the market, so customers and prospects will be uncritical to your attempts of creating a lock-in. Even if the chains are recognized,hey, they are chains of love. The second reason is that with having achieved maximum growth there is still plenty of time for your product to become a cash cow that can subsidize the development of related products that will reinforce and profit from the lock-in effect.

A good example is how Microsoft created its lock-in of the Desktop. After the launch of Windows 95 and NT 4.0 it had overwhelming market acceptance. My father took me, as a boy to a trade show, just to see Bill Gates speaking. And we were not the only fans eager of new Microsoft products. With this momentum, Microsoft could consolidate its offering by combining the Windows operating system with the Microsoft Office productivity suite, with the Exchange groupware server. This combination created a sustainable ecosystem, that customers happily accepted, developers adopted (remember the times when custom business applications were Visual Basic desktop applications) and that allowed Microsoft to conquer adjacent markets such as the Browser market.

The design problem with Microsoft's lock-in is that it is too visible and obvious, which means customers are aware of it, which creates an opportunity for competitors to attack the lock-in and offer "breaking free from the Microsoft lock-in" as an additional value proposition. As a result, Microsoft's ecosystem of connected applications is under market pressure: Firefox is gaining market share on the browser market and has just surpassed Internet Explorer, at least here in Europe. Google (and millions of web developers) are working to make the desktop operating system irrelevant, with Android they are challenging Microsoft's hold on mobile operating systems. With Eclipse developers have an alternative to the Visual Studio brand of software development environments (yes, I am aware, there are other cool open source IDEs, but not a single one has the breadth of Eclipse). Microsoft, noting how competition is starting to pick the locks, is doing its own job to damage its lock-in by offering a web-based version of Microsoft office that teaches customers to accept compromises on the look, feel and functionality of their productivity software, which opens another window of opportunity for competitors.

For a better way to design a lock-in we should not think of the big padlock, but of the thousand lines that are tying down Gulliver. For one, he is being tied down, while sleeping, which means - start the lock-in while nobody, at least not the customer, is watching. Secondly, with thousand lines there is no single line to identify that drives the lock-in, that can be easily attacked.

A good example of this is Apple's iTunes. Apple offers a very comfortable lock-in to its customers to make sure they stay loyal when new competitors emerge. Wether it is a streaming service like Spotify or Amazon's MP3 download service, all of them are unlikely to lure me away from iTunes - and it is not just iTunes, it is the iPhone, that extends the lock-in to the mobile carrier, it is the Airport Express and Apple TV that wire the living room entertainment system, it is the Genius service that gives personalized music recommendations (which are better than Amazon's item-based recommendations), it is the iTunes remote control application for the iPod touch, it is the Bonjour music sharing, it is the locked iPod database, it is the integration with iLife. If one line breaks down, for example DRM in the iTunes store, there are still enough combination points to make the lock-in effective and attractive.

If you have the opportunity to create a lock-in effect, keep these rules in mind:

1. do it at the right time
2. make sure nobody is watching
3. make it attractive to be locked in
4. keep building integration points

The announcement of closing my blog at weblogs.goshaky.com and posting new blog entries either here or at dev.day.com has invited a number of comments. As I expected, my "personal blogging is dead" remark caused a backslash, on the one hand from Tom Johnson, who writes about the constrains a blogger has to face that moves from personal blogging to corporate blogging. And on the other hand from Irina Guseva, who has been questioning my assessment both in the CMSWire article on our CQ Social Collaboration 5.2 launch and on twitter.