The jQuery Mobile Project

“The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI framework.”

Interesting project, and I’m excited to see so much effort put toward enhancing the web on mobile devices. A couple quick thoughts from my gut reaction:

Don’t forget about the IE6 curse

John Resig, the creator of jQuery, has heavily emphasized the goal of jQuery Mobile to work on all mobile browsers. This seems kind of like a futile effort to me because it implies building for the lowest common denominator and working upwards. We just left the dark ages of the desktop internet where obsessive focus on IE6 compatibility stunted growth. I hope the same mistake isn’t made again when optimizing and evolving technologies and interfaces for mobile devices. Forcing support for Bada and MeeGo seems very strange to me and I hope that support doesn’t lead to a worse experience for users of modern/competent browsers like WebKit.

The Uncanny Valley

The UI libraries for jQuery mobile, which were built by Filament Group in Boston, look great. However, when you look at the full specifications released today, you see that the navigation systems, interaction paradigms, animations, controls, and layout structures are all identical to those in iOS. The only difference here is the visual styling, which is clearly designed to be derived mixture of interface elements from iOS, Android, and WebOS. I think they succeeded in creating an attractive hybrid, but it’s giving me an uncanny valley feeling.

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Read: Announcing The jQuery Mobile Project

Visit: jQuery mobile.

Profound.

Visit: http://weeplaces.com/dustin-curtis/

Some thoughts on the firing of HP CEO Mark Hurd

You can read about Hurd’s resignation here.

This is really sad. HP has been making a lot of really interesting strategic decisions lately, some decisions that I think have been set up through acquisitions and product development over the past few years. Mark Hurd seemed to know what he was doing on a long term scale, which is something unusual in a company like HP. That he was fired over something as unrelated to business skill as sexual harassment is sad. Shame on him, of course, but I wonder if his absence will end up hurting HP more in the long term than his personal actions over the short term.

HP recently hired some top notch industrial designers, and their newest computers are built far better than the older ones. The acquisition of WebOS was strategic. HP is poised to take on Android and iOS if they can execute well enough. From what I have seen, HP has been putting all the pieces into place for positioning themselves as the Apple of the PC world, at least in their high end market. They even embarrassed Microsoft by refusing to support the Windows 7 Slate in a consumer device. That’s a big risk I was surprised HP took. It sends a message.

I was excited about HP’s future, but now I’m not so sure. HP just lost its Steve Jobs.

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Last year, the New York Times ran an awesome profile of Hurd and his reinvention of HP, which you can read here

The epitome of Steve Ballmer

On the Windows 7 Slate:

"Some of you will say, well, when? When? And I say, As soon as they're ready. It is job one urgency around here. Nobody is sleeping at the switch. And so we are working with [our] partners, not just to deliver something, but to deliver products that people really want to go buy."

STEVE BALLMER, MICROSOFT

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Such a novel idea he has, of delivering products that people really want to buy. But he's actually wrong. He should be delivering products people want to use.

Thoughts on the Posterous "hack"

UPDATE Sachin, cofounder of Posterous, responded to the hole here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443139. Apparently there’s even more security to prevent spoofing than I thought.

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I published an article about Posterous yesterday that received a lot of attention. In it, I pointed out that users do not need to create an account and can simply start using the service by emailing post@posterous.com. Today, someone forged my email headers and sent a fraudulent post to this blog. There are some interesting discussions on Hacker News about this “hack,” and I have some thoughts I wanted to add in relation to product design philosophy.

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A lot of product designers/coders make the mistake of focusing too heavily on security at the expense of user experience. The truth is — and this has been proven by the success of Posterous and the relatively low incidence of this type of hack — except for spammers who have a financial incentive to break your system, mere mortals will not normally have a problem with simple security breaches of this type.

No one wants to post malicious messages to my mom’s posterous blog. As long as the spammers are kept out, most people will never have a problem with fraudulent posts.

The ease of use that Posterous provides by just requiring me to send an email to post@posterous.com is worth the tradeoff of a hacker potentially posting to my blog. As a product designer, I fully understand this tradeoff. As a user, I fully accept it. http://blog.dustincurtis.com has received almost a million pageviews in the past year, and this is the first time this has ever happened. And It happened because I provoked it in an extremely popular article was posted to a community of hackers. To be honest, I expected someone to try this.

Someone suggested that Posterous use a GUID for each blog’s email addresses, such as B566EA61026F474BA8ADB877FF765087@postereous.com. This is exactly the solution other blog platforms have used, and it’s ridiculous. How am I supposed to remember this? It’s so much easier to just email post@posterous.com and forget about it. Even though it would be in my address book and it would probably be fairly easy to find, the cognitive overhead of having to think about this long string of numbers is not worth the tiny increase in security. Most people (mere mortals) would see this string of letters and numbers, see the instructions to “add this to your address book”, and then leave.

There is no problem to solve here. This is not a security breach. Posterous is functioning the way it’s supposed to — it’s still extremely easy to use! Trying to fix this kind of rare security breach by sacrificing customer experience is like McDonalds placing a gigantic poster in each restaurant saying “ONE REFILL PER CUSTOMER” just because a few people abuse the system. Sure, if Posterous can prevent such things from happening without sacrificing the user experience by putting in place some anti-fraud systems — which they have already, and which work often — that’s something they should do.

Apparently

You don’t need a password. Posterous fail.

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Someone posted this to Posterous using my email address, presumably because of a comment I left on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439370 . Incidentally, this was also posted to Twitter and Facebook.

It's possible to forge headers in certain circumstances. It's not easy. And this is the first time this has happened. (Actually it is easy to forge headers, but Posterous does some extra checks to make sure you really are you. Apparently, those checks didn't work well enough here.)

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UPDATE Sachin, cofounder of Posterous, responded to the hole here: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443139](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443139). Apparently there's even more security to prevent spoofing than I thought.

You should follow me on twitter here

I laughed at Posterous, but they proved me wrong

Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal excitedly told me about their master plan in the summer of 2008. They were going to build a new blogging service where users would send posts by email instead of by using a web interface. It was to be called Posterous, and I don’t think they had written single a line of code at that point. I laughed at them. “Another blogging service? Don’t we have enough of those,” I asked. “And by email? That’s just a feature any other service can add. You’re crazy.”

For the next few weeks, Tan and Agarwal hunkered down in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, MA and wrote thousands of lines of code. They launched Posterous on June 28th, 2008. Within weeks, thousands of people were actively using the service. It has now been about two years since they launched, and Posterous is visited by millions of people every month. I use it almost every day. You’re reading this on a Posterous blog.

Posterous took an idea and executed it extremely well. They launched early, with the minimum viable number of features, and then tested their theory that email was a better interface for posting — and of course it is, because everyone has an email account. Then they rapidly iterated. They added features one-by-one until finding themselves with a complete product that really is the dead simple way to post anything anywhere. They found a missing market in the blogging industry. Before Posterous, there wasn’t a service easy enough for mere mortals and simple enough for non-serious serious bloggers to want to use.

To use Posterous, all you have to do is send one email. You don’t even need to create an account; just email post@posterous.com and they link it to your email address automatically. Because you’re the only person with access to your email, you don’t even need a password on Posterous. Every time you email something to post@posterous.com, it gets posted to your blog.

My initial reaction to Tan and Agarwal when they told me about Posterous — that any other blogging platform could easily add post-by-email as a feature — was misguided. There’s a big difference between adding a feature to an existing product and building a product around a philosophy. Posterous is built around the philosophy that blogging should be a passive experience and that email is the simplest interface for posting. Post-by-email is Posterous' core essence, and the simplicity of that central feature has leaked to all other parts of the service making it an awesome product to use.

Visit: Posterous.com

You should follow me on twitter here.

iPhone 4: Who cares about pixel density? It's about interface definition.

Edit below

There has been a lot of discussion about the pixel density in iPhone 4’s Retina display, but most of those discussions are missing the point. The Retina display isn’t revolutionary because of pixel density — some Android phones have featured almost 300ppi for months. iPhone 4 is revolutionary because it has increased interface definition.

For the past twenty years or so, almost all screen-based user interfaces have been calibrated around a single point of reference — about 72 pixels per inch (which was determined by the first mass-produced CRT screens, which had that pixel density). Every interface element drawn on the screen in Windows or Mac OS X takes up a certain definite number of pixels that remains constant no matter how many pixels the screen has. Every element on the screen is designed to look decent when the screen has about 72 pixels per inch.

This means that if you draw the letter “a” in 12pt Helvetica on any screen, it will take up exactly 8x9 pixels (almost all the time). As you increase the number of pixels on the whole display, the number of pixels that it takes to draw the letter “a” in 12pt Helvetica stays the same, the letter just becomes smaller. As you increase the number of pixels on the screen, the amount of room you have for displaying stuff increases, but the interface definition stays the same.

iPhone 4’s operating system doesn’t work this way. It decouples the density of the pixels on the screen from the visual interface that it draws. Because OS X is built from the ground up to be resolution independent, all the default iOS interface elements are already vectorized graphics (PDFs, to be specific). This means that when iOS scales the elements in physical size to fit the 3.5-inch iPhone 4 screen, they take up the same amount of space as the elements drawn on the iPhone 3GS but they use four times the number of pixels.

Because so many more pixels are being used to render the same sized graphics, the definition increases to levels no one has ever seen before — because almost all screens have been calibrated at 72 pixels per inch. The letter “a” in 14pt is actually drawn with 16x18 pixels, meaning its curves and edges are far better defined.

iPhone 4’s Retina display isn’t really about the physical pixels (although they are necessary); it’s about increasing the definition of the interface as it’s drawn on the screen.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Android has some support for resolution independence, but it is not system-wide. The operating system itself enlarges most of its own elements, but because most apps are not built for random pixel densities, they generally do not look stunning.

Gross

Sent from my iPhone

Placing objects in toilet may cause system failure.

Sent from my iPhone to Treehouse on my iPad so I could take a photo and email it to Posterous while on an airplane.

Sent from my iPad