On working from home, from an interview between Shawn Blanc and John Gruber:

SHAWN: Additionally, my wife wants to know (a) what you eat for breakfast, and (b) if you like to hug your wife?
JOHN: I’m on an oatmeal kick this week, but usually just a banana. The big thing, though, is coffee, always coffee. And who doesn’t like to hug their wife? Is there an anti-hugging contingent out there I’m not aware of?
SHAWN: No. My wife just likes to know how other wives are treated by their work-from-the-home-office husbands.

Weirdly long and poetic article from the Washington Post on how Apple Stores are getting more crowded:

The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?

Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?

Can you smother a store to death?

"'Keyboard shortcuts are faster' is a myth" is a myth: In 1992, Tog wrote:

The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they could in some cases be faster than the mouse. Using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh, I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e." Just to make it even harder, the test subjects, when using the mouse, were forbidden to just drop the cursor to the right of the | and then use the delete key to get rid of it. Instead, they had to actually drag the mouse pointer across the one-pixel width of the character t o select it, then press the "e" key to replace it.

The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse, 50.22 seconds. I also asked the test subjects which method was faster, and to a person they reported that the cursor keys were much, much faster.

I have just duplicated Tog's experiment, also using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh. I used a 94-word sample and timed myself with Minuteur. Using the cursor keys took 93 seconds; using the mouse took 239 seconds.

Tog's research is at least 20 years old. It may have been relevant when keyboard shortcuts and computer users were both less advanced than they are now, but those days are gone. And yet the estimable John Gruber linked to Tog's column last week, as though it were something for contemporary users and developers to keep in mind. Someone cites it in a comments thread here. Squelch this revaunchist nonsense before it goes any further! Keyboard shortcuts work!

Just read (via DF) this 1989 article by Apple human interface guru Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini. In a nut:

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This had a big impact on me. I've been a keyboard-shortcuts guy ever since my first job, where my boss would stand over my shoulder and correct me when she saw me reach for the mouse. Now the first thing I do in a new app is train myself to use the key commands, and I've created custom shortcuts in all the apps I use frequently (e.g. in Word, Command-Option-W for Word Count), and I use Quicksilver to launch apps, open files, search Google, send email, get lunch, basically everything. All of this keyboarding makes me feel very efficient. And now here's Tog himself bringing my world crashing down around me.

But when you think about it, it can't be as simple as Tog suggests. The blanket statement, "Mousing is faster than keyboarding" is, presumably, true in certain circumstances. But it can't be true always and everywhere.

I spend a lot of time writing in Word. (I know, I know, but I'm used to it.) I try to write 2,000 words a day, and although I don't always manage it I usually get close enough. Based on a random sample of my prose, that's about 10,865 characters. I enter almost every one of these 10,865 characters into a Word document using the keyboard. According to Tog I should be able to save time by finding the character in the Symbol dialogue box and clicking on it.



Maybe that's a facile example. Tog might say, "Of course, I didn't mean typing words. That's what a keyboard is for. I meant performing other actions."

So here's an example that's more on point: saving. While I'm writing my 2,000 words, I am a saving freak. I save my document reflexively. Whenever I'm not typing, I'm saving. I'm sure I take saving to a useless and neurotic extreme, but it's a harmless neurosis -- the computer can handle all that saving, and it removes a source of worry, and I never have those I just lost two hours' work things that happen to other people.

I do all this saving using the venerable Command-S. I did it just now, after typing that last sentence, autonomically: hands in the resting position, left thumb about an inch to the left (I'm left-handed), left ring finger down. Boom, saved. Not once do I think about the Command key or the S key, just as I don't think about the Shift key or the T key when I begin to type Tog.

I could, instead, use the mouse to go to the File menu's Save command, or to the Save button in the toolbar. I find it hard to believe that would be quicker, but perhaps I'm falling victim to Tog's first point and failing to accurately register the time it takes to hit Command-S. So let's abstractify a little. I can't say for sure how fast I am at hitting Command-S, but I'm definitely faster than I was when I started using a computer. I'm faster than the average computer user, just because I do it so often. Either the speed of mouse-saving is like the speed of light, and there's no way you can ever catch up with it, or at some point I'm going to be faster with the keyboard than with the mouse.

Abstractify one layer further: If a keyboard shortcut is used frequently enough, and the buttons used are convenient and memorable enough, and the mouse alternative is sufficiently complex (identify the Save button from all the buttons on the toolbar, find the cursor, land the cursor on the Save button, click, return hands to the keyboard), then the keyboard shortcut is quicker and less distracting. If I only saved once a day, and the shortcut was Control-Option-Y instead of Command-S, and Microsoft had made the Save toolbar button twice as big, and there were no other buttons next to it on the toolbar, then using the mouse would be quicker.

And what about more data-dense applications? When I'm editing audio in Pro Tools and I need to move my cursor to a particular spot, there are 44,100 possible cursor locations per second of audio and maybe five minutes of audio represented on my screen. I can try to find that spot with the mouse, using repeated clicks of the zoom button, recentering, squinting at the waveforms, then unzooming back to the original view. Or I can hit the Tab key and, using Pro Tools's Tab to Transient feature, allow the software to find the exact spot I need. Is the mouse quicker then?

Tog wrote his piece in 1989, the year the first version of Pro Tools (then known as Sound Tools, which is a better name) was released. He can't be blamed for not knowing about high-resolution audio or video editing. Still, one wonders about the $50 million worth of testing he did. Did he test on anyone who'd spent ten years hitting Command-S as often as I do?

In fact, the answer to the question Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? is not Tog's one-size-fits-all answer (the mouse, and testing proves it!), nor the answer of my old boss (the keyboard, and get your hands off that mouse!). It's For what user, attempting to accomplish what task, under what circumstances?

Update: This 2005 paper (PDF) from the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction comes down squarely on the side of keyboard shortcuts.

It turns out that Fake Steve Jobs is a senior editor at Forbes named Daniel Lyons. Surprisingly, this was broken by the NYT rather than some obsessive tech blogger. Maybe we do need old media after all.

Update: FSJ himself says the same thing. Also, on the NYT's tech blog, Brad Stone (who broke the story) asks "Are you happy that the mystery has been solved? Or did we just ruin the fun for everyone?" In the comments, 21 out of 23 commenters pick the latter. "Ruined it completely. Sux big time!" writes MS. Obviously, this is a biased sample set but these folks are, not to put too fine a point on it, total morons. Dennis O'Connor takes the prize for perverse logic with:

Regardless of your infantile need to expose FSJ, we will continue to enjoy his comments if he chooses to continue. He should quit and let the scorn of thousands be heaped around your ears for ruining a good thing.

But he has some stiff competition from Matthew J, who says:

with all of the real news that needs to be slethed by a talented reporter such as yourself, isn’t it more than a little sophmoric to cover this at your paper AND, at the same time, ruin a perfectly good bit of sport?

(Um, how is this ruining a bit of sport rather than participating in it and winning?)

I sympathize with these morons on one point: it was kind of neat when FSJ was anonymous, because you could pretend he was a real person, like e.g. the Earth-Two version of Steve Jobs or something. And now we know he's a fictional construct, created by a guy who happens to have a vendetta against the open-source movement. That's kind of a shame, because the pleasure of FSJ is the plausibility of its insights into Steve Jobs's head. I had thought, Yeah, I bet Steve Jobs really does think that the Free Software people are losers. And I still think he probably does, but the fun of speculation is dampened by the fact that this is obviously the author's POV too.

Still, that same observation reveals something interesting: it makes sense that a guy who engages in a long-term ventriloquism project like this one, who spends more than a year thinking "What might Steve Jobs have to say today?", will wind up writing about the topics that interest him, even if he does so through the point of view of his subject. Like if I decided to write a blog in the voice of Fake Steve Martin or Fake Stevie Wonder or Fake Stephen Hawking, I'd end up writing about that fake person's perspective on comic books and Apple. Something like this happens in most fiction, I suspect, although I have so far kept references to comics and Apple to a minimum in my own novel-in-progress.

Plus more: Daniel Lyons's personal blog, the one in his own voice that mostly covers open-source shenanigans, is a funny and interesting window into a world about which I know very little. Most of it is straight reporting/opinionizing, but here's a satirical entry that could have appeared word for word on FSJ.

If you haven't been reading Fake Steve Jobs lately, he's been on something of a roll. Here's Caroline McCarthy on the anonymous blogger's old-school charm:

In a culture captivated--obsessed, even--by the antics of high society, an anonymous satirist starts publishing over-the-top missives purporting to be from an insider in that privileged niche. In the process, the faux-mogul skewers political elites, entertainers, business titans, and ordinary people in a way that's at once outlandish and provocative, hilarious and appalling. It reeks of Swift or Dickens or Twain.

Plus: Andy Ihnatko forthrightly denies that he's FSJ:

I say this here and now, without a single wink or ironic note: I’m not him. I had nothing to do with the blog’s creation and have never had the slightest thing to do with any of its content.

This is pretty funny.

The mayor of Philadelphia is currently third in line for an iPhone at the AT&T store in Philly.

Fake Steve Jobs:

To those of you who serve under me at Apple, I say this: Yes, I have berated you, and insulted you, and exasperated you. Yes, I've fired your friends for no reason, and made you work harder than you ever thought you could work. Yes, I've taken you away from your spouses, your children, your transgendered domestic partners. In some cases your devotion to me has cost you your marriages. You've sacrificed a great deal for this. But has it not been worth it?

Far from the tree

When I heard the Safari-for-Windows rumor, my response was, "It'll never happen -- Apple is a hardware company." Apple's business model is: (1) make objects; (2) sell them for a profit. They make OSX to sell Macs. They make iTunes (for Mac and PC) to sell iPods. How could Safari for Windows help their bottom line? If I had had more time yesterday I would have written a post to that effect, linked to Mary Jo Foley's blog, and looked like a moron.

So now I'm confused.

The main justification I've heard is that WinSafari is a kind of advertisement for OSX. As Engadget put it, "it seems the Apple folks plan to use it in much the same way they've used iTunes to grow the Mac fanbase by giving Windows users 'a glass of ice water to somebody in hell!'" In other words, Steve Jobs believes that PC users will try Safari and think, "This free browser is awesome -- now I'm going to spend $2,000 on a new computer to get other software that is presumably equally awesome." I find this hard to believe. Safari is a good browser, but it's not that much better than Firefox.

So what's Apple thinking?

My guess is that it has something to do with the new iPhone development standards that Jobs announced today. For those of you who don't follow this stuff as obsessively as I do: independent software developers (i.e. programmers who don't work for Apple) will be able to write programs for the iPhone, but those programs will be akin to "web apps" like Google Maps and Flickr -- they'll run in the iPhone's web browser, which (it so happens) is a version of Safari.

So what I'm thinking is this: there will be occasions when a developer wants to write a program that runs on both the iPhone and the desktop (e.g. a program that syncs data between your phone and your computer in some specialized way). For most purposes, the iPhone will integrate with your computer using iTunes, just like the iPod does. But these new iPhone programs can't run in iTunes, because iTunes doesn't run web apps.

If Apple wants to accomodate them, there's three choices: (a) build browser-type features into iTunes; (b) force developers to write apps that work on Firefox or Internet Explorer as well as Safari; (c) port Safari to Windows. Option (a) stretches the iTunes concept (already pretty elastic) past breaking point. Option (b) would have worked for a while, mostly, but it risks sticking developers with compatibility issues going forward, which might have been a brake on iPhone software development. Option (c) allows Apple to build special features into this or future versions of Safari, just for developers of iPhone software.

So that's my guess: that the version of Safari on your computer will integrate with the version on your iPhone in some way. Time will tell.

Three new TV ads demonstrating the iPhone's interface. Holy cow. Update: Gruber goes into detail: "I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen any tech product advertised simply by demonstrating how it works."

Interesting Fortune piece calling Apple "the best retailer in America." Fun fact: "Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666." Apple: $4,032.

Clever and kind of devastating (unofficial) Obama video parody of Apple's famous "1984" commercial.

My slow descent into Apple fanboyism continues

In honor of the World's Most Desirable Gadget, here's a Wired interview with Steve Jobs from 1996 (the Wilderness Years, when Jobs was in exile and Apple was foundering). Lots of remarks of historical interest, such as: "The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost." Also, an anecdote that reveals both where things like the iPhone come from and what it's like to be married to Steve Jobs:

Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn't have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better - but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They're too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

Anti-Microsoft conspiracy theories ahoy!

In the course of launching its iPod rival the Zune, Microsoft has made a weird deal with Universal Music. Universal was balking at allowing Microsoft to sell its music on the new Zune-compatible online music store, so Microsoft agreed to give Universal a percentage of the revenue from the Zune itself. Bear in mind: Universal will still get the revenues from the sales of its songs, but now it'll also get revenues from sales of the player.

Medialoper breaks it down:

Basically, what [Universal CEO Doug Morris] is saying is this:

• Every single person who buys a portable media player is a thief and a pirate.
• All music comes from Universal.
• Therefore, you should pay extra for any device you use to store music, you fracking thief.

John Gruber asks:

I don't get it. Why would Microsoft do this?

Why would they enter into a deal that will cost them money and potentially fuck up a market they're trying to enter? The answer, I think, is pretty simple: to the extent that they do fuck up the market, it will be Apple, which owns something like 88 percent of the market for legal music downloads and 75 percent of the market for digital music players, that suffers.

Remember, for Apple the iTunes Store is almost a loss leader: after paying royalties to the record companies, Apple's profits on each 99-cent song are measly. But making most of the popular-music canon easily and cheaply available online sure helps them sell those iPods, which are high-margin items. Ever since this arrangement began, the record companies have been grumbling about having their product turned into a commodity to help Steve Jobs sell iPods, but they don't have much choice if they want any kind of revenue stream from music downloads to replace CD sales. (Remember CDs?) Microsoft is offering them a better deal, and setting a precedent for them to use in negotiations with Apple. (Right now "negotiations with Apple" consist of Steve telling the labels how it's going to work, and the labels saying "Thank you sir, can I have another?" But it won't always be that way.)

The likelihood of this panning out for Microsoft is not huge. But the Zune was always a long-shot bet; the Universal deal is a way for Microsoft to diversify the potential upside a bit, by adding the possibility that they could mess with Apple's profits.

Update: Other people have come to the same conclusion. Gruber disagrees, and I think he's probably right.

As you probably know, Apple recently started selling feature films through the iTunes Store (formerly known as the iTunes Music Store). Wal-Mart (a huge player in the DVD retail market) has reason to fear that this will cut into their bottom line. Now, the Post reports, studio executives say Wal-Mart has threatened to buy fewer DVDs from any studio that goes into business with Apple. Early adopter Disney has already received "cases and cases" of returned DVDs.

Would someone who knows something about antitrust law please tell me this: If these allegations are true, isn't Wal-Mart opening itself up to an anticompetitive-practices lawsuit?

Update: Wal-Mart disputes the Post's report.

Slate's Seth Stevenson gives a thumbs down to the new Mac ads:

In the case of these Mac ads ... I'm smack in the middle of the target demo. I'm a PC user, and I've often considered switching to an Apple. Thus, I feel equipped to say: These ads don't work on me. They are conceptually brilliant, beautifully executed, and highly entertaining. But they don't make me want to buy a Mac.

Astonishingly, it turns out the PC is played by John Hodgman.

Oranges are not the only fruit

Some new ads in the "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" series debuted today. (Check them out here.) Some thoughts:

• These ads are attempting to do something difficult: explaining to PC users that the everyday hassles of Windows -- restarting your computer every ten minutes, downloading drivers for every new gadget you buy, having your computer captured by spammers and turned into a zombie -- are not just an unavoidable part of computing life.
  
• More important than any specific argument made by the Mac guy in these ads is his whole attitude. He's not hostile to the PC. He's friendly and slightly condescending. ("You should see this guy with a spreadsheet," he says.) This is a great corporate attitude for Apple, with ~4 percent market share, to project. Treating Windows like the evil empire (in the style of the classic "1984" Apple spot) would only contribute to its air of monopolistic inevitability.
• It's cool that the PC looks slightly like Bill Gates.
• The gag in the "Touché" ad gets the usage wrong: the PC is using the word correctly, and the Mac should get off his case.

Boot Camp counselors: The smartest comments on last week's Macs-will-boot-Windows announcement came, unsurprisingly, from John Gruber and John Siracusa.

That's a good one. Also: "The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the '60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google's Larry Page." Boy, that's a long way.

(By the way, Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and graduated in high school in 1972, but if you're writing in the Weekly Standard you get an extra 20 bucks every time you can blame something on the 1960s.)