OK, (ouch) everybody out there (bonk) in the blogosphere just (oof) take a deep (splat) breath! We are not backing away from Webkit no matter what you might have read on one of those new-fangled “website” things — I’ll have to get somebody to show me one sometime soon. As I understand it, one of our developers did some housekeeping on the Tiger branch of the webkit project, and some people thought it looked like we were backing away from the whole open-source project. No, no, no — it’s just that we’re focusing on the newer Leopard branch, we have a lot on our plates right now (you might have heard about Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, for example) and there’s only so much we can do at once. It’s not that we don’t appreciate the attention, of course, but any talk about S60 Browser backing away from Webkit isn’t true. Gotta run; just heard Elvis was spotted in Boston Commons…

*cursor here. thanks for throwing tomatoes at pesky human, why no cheese too?*

The Jitterbug phone is a radically simple device; it makes and receives calls. You don’t even have to dial numbers if you don’t want to. It has no “confusing icons”. It’s not from Nokia.

It’s not that Nokia doesn’t make simple phones, although I’m not sure we make a phone entirely free of icons. By “simple” I mean “vastly less complex than any S60 device”, by the way. The Jitterbug is a marketing approach, more than anything. There’s a bit of design there, but I think it’s essentially an off-the-shelf Samsung phone being marketed to people who specifically dislike products like S60 phones. I occasionally meet people in that category, and their dislike can be quite intense.

This is interesting. I don’t think “ease of use” is exactly the issue; it’s complexity of use, even if that complexity is made easy to cope with. Complexity, for some people, is a problem; a bug in the system. And it’s a problem that I think can’t be helped by any amount of interface design — the only acceptable way to design a product that will appeal to people in this category is to remove functions. This is quite the opposite of many people, and I suspect virtually the entire S60 market. Maybe it’s a generational thing, as suggested here. I think about it like this: there are “simplifiers” and then there are “complexifiers”.

As an interface designer, I find this fascinating. Assuming we could make a product a simplifier would not want to kick us out of town for producing (remember, that dislike can be intense), I like thinking about how to design a browser they’d like.

I even have a personal project in this direction. I’m motivated by something quite personal; my mother is one of these function-averse people. She does not have (will not accept) a telephone answering machine. She barely tolerates a phone at all. Do not mention “mobile phone” to her. Please. I know what will happen. And yet…she loves to read and has quite an extensive library. Before her retirement, she was a nurse and had no difficulty with medical equipment, including electronic monitors with fairly arcane interfaces (I didn’t play with them when they were connected to anyone). Anyway, I think she would enjoy the web, and she would be easily able to cope with it aside from attitudinal issues. The design challenge is to create a browser that she, and people like her, would find appealing.

I’ll let you know. Um, by a letter written in ink on paper, just like it’s supposed to be!

It’s interesting to think about the possibilities around a piece of hardware dedicated to reading ebooks, and fun to play with design possibilities. When it comes right down to it, though, like most people I don’t have one. I don’t even have any plans to get one unless the price comes down drastically; I like reading ebooks, but I already have a mobile phone (okay, I have about six) and a laptop, and those work fine. Not perfectly, perhaps, but good enough for me. Author Cory Doctorow addresses this in his Locus Magazine essay:

No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one.

I probably qualify as a more-than-occasional reader, but any gadget costing US$400 is competing with things like S60s, complete (low end) computers, which do more, and even game consoles. For the time being, I think “ebook reader” means “software running on a device you already own.”

Here’s a fun idea: VerveEarth is plotting bloggers on a world map. It’s a Google Map, I think. It seems to be quite new, as it’s still in beta and the map is not very well populated yet. This idea suggests things like moving the affinity-based connections now exploding on the web into the physical world on a more local level than “big” conferences where everybody goes to, say, Paris all at once.

As blogs become partially hosted on mobile devices, an obvious extension of the VerveEarth idea (that they’re probably working on, for all I know) is plotting your current location and indexing by affinity or topic. That would be a way to discover, for example, that an author of one of your favorite food-review blogs is in the same restaurant you’re in right now. Which could in turn lead to new connections, and for that matter, you could end up as a guest reviewer. “Oh, you had the salmon? How was it?”

Here’s a feature of some ebook readers that I have a mixed reaction to: autoscrolling. Autoscrolling is simply automatically moving the content so you don’t have to scroll or page through it manually.

I find that autoscrolling can work very well for me in two cases: I’m reading for about three to five minutes, and I’m using a device with an excellent screen (an iPhone or an N95, for example). The time constraint is simply about eyestrain; something about reading text that’s autoscrolling seems to make my eyes work harder. Maybe some readability experts out there can explain this?

The screen issue is pretty obvious; the text isn’t really moving, of course; it’s an effect caused by controlling the pixels. With lower resolution, that motion is less “convincing” and I find it a bit distracting.

By the way, an autoscrolling effect can be done in a browser window via JavaScript. There are many libraries available and I haven’t enough of them to give a recommendation. If you’re interested, search the web for “javascript autoscroll” and you’ll get thousands of hits.