From the section of the iOS HIG about writing alert copy:
> Avoid using “you,” “your,” “me,” and “my” as much as possible. Sometimes, text that identifies people directly can be ambiguous and can even be interpreted as an insult.
I agree with this. Using the example from the article, "Profile" is just as expressive as "My Profile", more concise, and groups better with other similar actions. Taken to its logical extreme, you'll have to put "My" everywhere; imagine GMail with "My Inbox", "My Starred", "My Important Messages", "My Circles", etc.
I think pronouns should be reserved more for interactions, where a UI's personality really shines through. So when refreshing your inbox, you may see "Fetching your email", for example.
Why does a UI have to have personality? Why can't it just look good and be easy to use? Does anyone actually care if an application is "speaking" as if it is a conscious entity?
For a tool that you use as often as Gmail, you want something functional, but that doesn't mean it can't let the personality of Google shine through. Gmail's empty spam page says something like "No spam here, Hurray!" where as Outlook's says generic and bland like "There are no items in this view".
However, consider a shopping experience that you may use a couple of times per year at most. The application has a real opportunity to expose the user to your brand.
Also consider a new user experience that you only ever do once. These processes are boring, so maybe some personality helps conversions and reduces falloff.
There is no right answer here because there are so many different types of applications.
> Why can't it just look good and be easy to use? Does anyone actually care if an application is "speaking" as if it is a conscious entity?
I don't think it's fair to say that a UI shouldn't attempt to have some "personality". Whether it is ultimately effective (or not) is another argument entirely, but there is more to UX than just the style and "ease of use".
Copy, labeling and alerts are all part of the UX too.
Good UI design is all about effective communication. If you have a UI that is pretending to be something it isn’t (a person) then it is basically lying to you. That’s hardly good communication. It’s confusing and dishonest.
And believe it or not there are some users who won’t understand that it isn’t really a person. Some minds are very prone to anthropomorphizing especially when they are dealing with something they find hard to understand and unpredictable like a computer.
"Having a personality" is going to happen whatever you do.
Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn't mean your interface pretends it's a person; but all copy is written by people -- words are used by people only (pretty much), directly or indirectly -- and the words chosen are projecting some personality onto the application whether you want to or not.
There are no words/phrases/instructions without baggage, connotations, etc..
I have no objection to that. I just don’t want those words written by people to make it sound like the application is a person. The app can talk about itself doing things (it does do things after all) but not as a human being with feelings and stuff.
Yeah, actually even in that case, I'd prefer no pronouns. "Fetching email" is much better IMO, and possibly more accurate (Imagine my girlfriend logged into my email for instance).
Mostly. The downside is with words ("profile" even, though rarely enough that it probably doesn't matter) that can be both nouns and verbs. Leaving off the my/your then makes the button ambiguous.
Anecdotally, I have run into this with Google Products (Mail & Voice): The "Archive" button is problematic because you can almost always navigate to the noun Archive folder, or verb Archive an item.
This is the proper approach, I suppose. I don't use images for button labels in Gmail's interface myself, but I'm pretty sure that properly designed icons + tooltips with verbs (for both icons and textual labels) can be used quite effectively to differentiate between verbs and nouns: 'arrows' icons as verbs for moving stuff, 'boxes' images as nouns for storage places, 'tools' as verbs for some particular actions associated with those particular tools, etc. - just your usual common sense UI stuff.
Switched Gmail settings to icons for buttons just to check if this is being used here and immediately notice annoying inconsistency in Gmail's UI: Archive button has an icon of a storage box with an arrow (good choice), but has ambiguous tooltip saying 'Archive', whilst Delete button has an icon of just a trash bin with a proper action-tooltip 'Delete'. 'Report spam' has the worst icon by far, I think. Then again - manila folder icon for moving to label (which is a bit unclear) - it acts very much like the 'archive' action, but somehow doesn't have an arrow. Labels button tooltip - 'Labels' - also lacks the word 'apply/attach/add'. I understand that you can get accustomed to almost anything, but this doesn't mean you have to fight your way through UI.
I thought a bit more about this and now I think that a verb is more or less mandatory for buttons of actions, i.e. for buttons that change some objects properties or performs actions on the objects ('Apply labels', 'Move to trash' are probably better than 'Labels', 'Trash'). Verbs are not mandatory for buttons that just change your position inside the system ('Go to inbox' is probably worse than 'Inbox').
Rather than the language used, perhaps the interface would give the proper contextual cue:
* Use a button interface for all actions the user can take: [send][archive].
* Use a link for nouns / places the user can go: inbox | archive | trash.
* Icons tend to be actions (a star for 'mark this as a favorite', a trash can for 'delete this thing', a paper+pencil for 'edit this entry'), so they get grouped more with the buttons.
Yet Siri calls me 'you', and refers to herself as 'I'. Rules are made to be broken. Actually, on a recent road trip, I found myself asking Siri for an update on my progress by asking: "What's our ETA?". While she gave me the right answer, I kind of wish she'd responded by saying when "we" would arrive. An interface that is actually in it together with me - that would be a step forward.
Siri is not an app. Siri was built to be a personal assistant, and as such, it was designed to have a personal connection with the user, making the 'you' and 'I' very important. Interesting point about 'we', though.
> some more info on where you'll be gathering this information and how you'll choose to aggregate it
My server basically spends the week trawling GitHub for trending projects, so the scope of what can appear in a newsletter is kinda limited for now (only stuff that's trending on GitHub). In the future, I'm thinking of looking in other places (Twitter, Pinboard, etc.) for content to put in the newsletter, but the problem there is relating a link in a tweet to a particular programming language — things like PHP and Objective-C are easy enough, but just doing a search for tweets with "#python" and links in them isn't going to return very many meaningful results. So this is just a first release to test the waters and see if there's demand for something like Cccode. If there is, I plan on broadening the scope a bit. For now, though, think of it as "the hottest (GitHub) projects in your favourite language".
> Website idea: show two random movies, ask them if they've seen both, and if they have, ask the user which one's better without prescribing what "better" means. Repeat 1 trillion times.
Having played with the site for the past 20 minutes now, the by far most difficult thing is choosing between two horrible movies. I really wish there was a "they're both equally horrible" button.
That's really neat. It's quite addictive to rank films that way. Annoyingly hard in some instances. The only thing I think is lacking is some way to get a reminder about the plot; when you're talking about movies seen more than a couple of decades ago ...
> I should not have to manually initiate the dropbox backup
I'm pretty sure you only have to start it once. After that, anything you Gimme gets put into your Dropbox folder right away. At least, that's how my Gimme Bar works.
I originally thought you had to had to go to Gimme Bar's website each time you wanted to back up, like you said, but recently (maybe a month ago?) files started being automatically put into my Dropbox folder as soon as I Gimme'd them. I'm not sure what happened, but I'm glad about the change.
So, tl;dr: Dropbox backup definitely works the way it should.
As for future-proofing, I think this Gimme Bar does a pretty good job. If Gimme Bar ceased to exist, you'd still have your library in your Dropbox folder. If Dropbox ceased to exist, your Dropbox folder would still be a folder on your computer, and your Gimme Bar library would still be there.
So, for you to completely lose your entire Gimme Bar library, all three of the following things would have to happen:
1. Dropbox would have to shut down,
2. Gimme Bar would have to shut down, and
3. The hard drive on every computer you had Dropbox installed on would have to fail, as would every back-up of every one of those drives.
If you wanted to go to Siracusian lengths, I guess you could install Dropbox's server client on a VPS. That way, you'd have your Dropbox stuff in your own cloud as well as in Dropbox's, so even if all three of the above things happen, you'd still have access to your stuff.
Pinboard I use for pointers to things - GitHub projects that might come in handy in the future, development/design resources, particularly interesting Wikipedia articles, and other things like interviews and magazine articles.
But there's some stuff that I want to keep. I used to have a `~/box` folder on my Mac where I'd keep pictures, quotes, and screenshots of web pages I really liked. I wanted to keep them locally so that I would always have a copy of them. However, there were problems with this. By just keeping pictures as files, I couldn't always easily find where the picture came from (not without coming up with a complicated naming scheme or moving away from the simplicity of just having files in a folder). I kept quotes in plain text, so attribution was difficult for them, too — I needed to be able to capture quotes quickly, so I didn't have time to also store the URL the quote came from. And screenshots of webpages aren't exactly interactive — if I wanted to look at some HTML to see how something was done on the page, too bad. I also didn't have a pretty way to look at all the things I'd wanted to keep. All I had was a Finder window.
I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page. Besides, if I archive the whole page, how can I indicate which image/quote I wanted to save in the first place? Long story short, Pinboard's archiving isn't quite what I want (though, like I said, I've been thinking about switching it on for backing up interviews).
Gimme Bar is basically the best of all those worlds. I can save images, videos, quotes, and site designs. I can easily see where the image/quote/etc. came from. The site gives me a purdy way of looking at them. And integration with Dropbox means I always have a local copy of everything. Gimme Bar lets me have my cake, eat it, and have my cake stored in Dropbox (I may be stretching this metaphor).
> I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page.
Hard drive space is cheap, cheaper than your own time when you discover you want context or perhaps some other choice sentence from that page. The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.
(My own current solution-hack is two parallel systems: manual Evernotes for specific quotes or photos, and an automatic archive system that downloads the entire page: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs So I consult one or the other as appropriate.)
> The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.
Agreed. That's definitely something I'd love to see Gimme Bar do: in addition to showing me the quote I pulled out of the page, also give me the option to see the full page, with the text I quoted highlighted.
FYI, if you want to recover the origin of those ~/box pictures, they may have the original URL and referring URL stored in their metadata. Anything saved from a web browser should have this information in it.
You can use "mdls" to see it. I put a quick and dirty python library to get and set these values at: https://gist.github.com/2889617 (I use it to backup this data.)
This field can also help you find the source of those random pdf files lying around your disk. And you can query it with spotlight. For example,
> If I remember correctly, Apple elected not to allow a 2 button mouse for a long time earlier in their history because they wanted to force developers to build apps that worked just fine with 1 button.
I think you might be thinking of the reason the 128K Mac didn't have a terminal. In that case, they wanted to force developers to make new, graphical programs instead of just porting their terminal programs to the Mac. The mouse had one button [to cater to users][1]:
> The powers at Apple concluded that because the mouse was a whole new way for users to interact with their computers, it should be as uncomplicated as possible. Hence, one button.
The original Mac did not have arrow keys on its keyboard. This was to encourage programmers to write programs that use the mouse. I'm pretty sure I read this originally on http://www.folklore.org, but I can't find that particular story right now.
http://watchlaterapp.com/ will do offline caching (including Flash videos) to your iPad, but it's only a web/iPad service, so I'm not sure it ticks the "multiple device" box.
interesting, though I just signed up and my video player was empty, and I'm hesitant to pay for their iPad app.
That's one of the things I like about the onboarding experience with Shelby.tv; when you sign up, you can start watching what your friends are tweeting/sharing since it pulls it from you twitter/facebook accounts.
