I’m late to the party, but I just watched the HP Envy design video. Oh my. It’s a really stunning piece of work that makes me wonder if HP’s designers are suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or whether they’re just delusional.

If you’ve not seen the HP Envy, it’s like a MacBook Pro knock-off made by some dodgy Chinese company, with a horrible volume knob glued to the side and that your kid’s drawn on (carefully, mind) in felt-tip pen. (HP calls these elements ‘colour accents’, rather than ‘a really shit idea that looks horribly out of place and distracts from the otherwise somewhat clean design’ or ‘a desperate attempt to try and make people think we haven’t actually ripped off Apple’).

Some choice quotes from the video:

The first goal was to create a super-clean high-end design, and we did that in the geometry we chose

Presumably by popping to the nearest Apple Store and going “we’ll rip off… that one” and pointing to a MacBook Pro.

The second one was a level of honesty. That was really a key goal.

Honesty that doesn’t extend quite so far as to admit that the design is a total rip-off of something that already exists, natch.

The materials that we used were really true to this core attribute of honesty.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean the materials include “we ripped off Apple and we’re really sorry” being burned into the base of every model.

The last one was really key as we brought Beats Audio into the Envy landscape.

It’s always a good idea when you bring another company into the mix, because that never compromises your design aesthetic.

We wanted to […] visualise the audio and go beyond the sense or the audible sound of the Beats with Envy

“We were told that we had to somehow integrate the Beats Audio branding.”

You’ll notice with the product that we integrated a volume wheel that has what I call interaction gravity

And what I call a large volume knob oddly and intrusively shoved on to the side of a notebook. Still, I guess HP’s research must have shown that volume control was something people needed to mess with all of the time, and that existing media keys for doing so were just too hard for people to understand. Either that or it’s a stupid gimmick, in part demanded as part of the co-branding with Beats…

That is what pulls people into the product to interact with it

Unlike, say, the keyboard and the screen. Or perhaps they have ‘interaction gravity’ too. Man, my pen, which I just used to scribble a note, also has interaction gravity! As does the notepad! And my desk! And my chair! INTERACTION GRAVITY IS EVERYWHERE!

It allows the user a finite control of audio

As opposed to an infinite control of audio, which would be bad.

It feels a lot like a high-end stereo knob […] and it’s something we prototyped time and time again […] so we got this sense of quality

This bit’s at 1:45 and there’s a palpable sense of depression coming from the designer as he says “time and time again”. It’s like he’s trying to scream: “They forced us to improve the knob. Time and time again! THEY WOULDN’T LET US LEAVE UNTIL THE KNOB WAS PERFECT!”

Envy is about the beauty of the details

Details mostly designed several years ago by Apple. Well, bar the numeric keyboard that forces the trackpad to be oddly left-of-centre. That’s detail.

Has that next layer of design when you start to engage it

I have engaged you, notebook! Show me your next level of design!

When you open it up, it’s a little like Christmas

What, in that you thought you were getting something great, but when you open the box you see your aunt’s bought you a fucking Gobot instead of a Transformer?

In that there’s quite a few things inside the product that really draw your attention

Oh, OK. That’s just what I think of when someone mentions Christmas: things inside a product that really draw your attention. Man, Christmas round designer bloke’s house must be a laugh riot.

Colour accents that tie us into Beats Audio

Ah, the next layer of design: a horrible red stripe inside the keyboard. Mmm.

It’s a product that creates envy

Mostly on the part of the design team, who wish they were working for Apple.

Cult of Mac today moans about iCal. I wonder if this comes from author Giles Turnbull using the application or just the oddly negative responses he and others have seen online. Nipping through the article:

Yesterday, the guys at Macworld published a useful article about making Lion’s iCal less annoying, but just as useful and entertaining were the comments beneath it.

The simple fact that Macworld felt the need to write an annoyances-fixing article speaks volumes.

Not really. People hate change. It doesn’t really matter what you do to an application: when you change some of it, people will get pissed off and want to change it back.

One good suggestion was to avoid iCal altogether, and buy another calendar app. Apple’s iCal is designed in such a way that it stores its event data in a database, which other apps can access. If you’re already an iCal user, it’s easy to try out alternative calendar apps without having to export and import your data, as long as they support use of iCal events. Most of them do, these days. One of my favorites is QuickCal.

I admit that I was initially tempted to try an alternative to iCal, but I decided to stick with it. For a little context, it’s worth explaining how I use iCal. I block in events across four calendars: work, home, and two ‘urgent’ versions of each. For magazine articles and other work, I create an event that approximates how long I think a piece of work will take, and I block recurring commissions as far into the future as possible. This enables me to see if, say, October is full and that I really shouldn’t be taking on extra cover features unless I somehow figure out how to clone myself. I then use iCal to manage my daily work, deleting events as I complete the relevant task, or, for personal/home things, as the event passes.

For me, there are only three things I really dislike about the new iCal:

• The visual design is hideous. I suspect this is Apple very intentionally starting the transition to iOS-like apps in OS X and that we’re going to see more skeuomorphic user interface design in forthcoming revisions to the system. It’s a pity, because the ‘leather’ toolbar is distracting and the text on it isn’t as readable as it is in other apps. Next to the smart, sleek new Mail, iCal just looks like a kiddie app; it’s even at odds with its own smart preferences pane. But this isn’t a deal-breaker, even if I did hack out the ‘torn paper’ graphic under the toolbar.
• Apple removed the mini-calendar sidebar, which I used daily to rapidly navigate my events. Navigation is now a little slower, but this also isn’t a deal-breaker.
• It’s mildly more awkward to create an event in a specific calendar, although you can click-hold the ‘add event’ button to select a calendar or very easily switch calendar once an event is created. This is very much not a deal-breaker.

During the spate of articles about Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple CEO, one of the major aspects of his success was put down to an ability to say no. This leaves Apple products with fewer features than those from its rivals, but, typically, superior usability and focus. The blog post Improvements in Windows Explorer rather starkly highlights the opposite approach. It traces the lineage of Microsoft’s file manager, from its hideous beginnings in Windows 1.0 through to the arrival of sanity in Windows XP. But then you get to Windows 8.

Over the years, Explorer has grown to support a number of different scenarios, many unrelated to file management – launching programs, viewing photos, playing videos, and playing music, to name just a few. We wanted to know which of these capabilities customers were really using. Using telemetry data, we were able to answer the question of how the broadest set of customers use Explorer in aggregate. As a reminder, the telemetry data is opt-in, anonymous, and private, but it does represent hundreds of millions of sessions from all customer types.

This data is pretty interesting. First it shows that even though there are over 200 commands in Explorer, customers use a small number of them with any real frequency: the top 10 commands represent 81.8% of total usage. Additionally it shows us that people overwhelmingly use Explorer for core file management tasks – the top 7 commands (72.2% of usage) are all for managing/manipulating files.

Apple’s clearly done similar testing with its applications over the years, in an effort to streamline. Finder has, if anything, simplified during OS X’s evolution. Therefore, it seems someone removed logic from the equation in allowing Microsoft’s Explorer team to do this:

To be fair, the Ribbon can be hidden in Explorer, and that’s just as well, because Microsoft’s created a horrible mess that will intimidate newcomers: instead of concentrating in the “top 10 commends [that] represent 81.8% of total usage”, this new interface flings tons of options in your face. It’s also hard to tally this vision of the future of computing not only with Apple’s iOS but also Microsoft’s own Windows Phone OS, which is currently being smashed into Windows 7 with a hammer, to create the hybrid OS that Steve Ballmer seems to think everyone wants.

Perhaps Microsoft will emerge victorious. Maybe people really do want to run the ‘full’ version of Excel on a tablet device rather than the sleek and simpler Numbers on an iPad. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion the kind of craziness and chaos showcased in the Microsoft blog post rather shows the opposite. It’s complexity for the sake of it, and showcases an inability to say no to including something, ‘just in case’ a few users might need it.

GigaOM’s Kevin Tofel’s got the wrong end of the stick. In his article Newest iOS 5 beta adds gestures, may replace buttons, he’s located iOS 5’s Assistive Touch option (to aid those users physically unable to use hardware buttons) and said it could signal that future iOS devices will lose the home button (and perhaps other buttons, too).

To me, what this signals is merely that Apple cares about users with disabilities, but nothing more. For people who cannot use the physical buttons on their devices, this extra slice of accessibility is fantastic. For everyone else, it’s sub-optimal. Tofel’s idea brings to mind Jon Bell’s recent, brilliant The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped. Within, he argues that anyone designing a device where they replace an important hardware button with a capacitive button needs a solid kick in the head (I might have paraphrased there). And here’s the reason why:

A button with no physical hardware […] makes no distinction between “I pressed that button because I meant to” and “my finger brushed against the face of the phone, sending me to another screen against my will, sometimes even losing data in the process.”

Imagine Apple decides on a capacitive home button for the iPod touch. You’re playing the super new Sega kart-racing game, and you’re about to win. But, STUPID YOU, you brush against the invisible button! And you’re back at your home screen. Great. And not to mention the simple fact that physical buttons are an accessibility aid in themselves, both to disabled users and everyone else, since you can feel the device and instinctively know which way up it is.

About the only problem I have with the iOS home button is its multi-functional behaviour, which flummoxes new users: click to return to the most recent home screen, except when you’re on said home screen, in which case it returns to your first home screen, unless you’re on that screen, in which case it invokes Spotlight; oh, and double-click to access the multi-tasking tray that most users have no idea exists. But that’s a software problem, not a hardware issue; on the hardware front, I believe Apple’s got things spot-on, and the day the home button becomes virtual is the day something’s gone horribly wrong at Cupertino.

Update: Andrew Durdin offers a frankly frightening How to use the Home Button visual guide.

Harry Marks, writing for his Curious Rat website on Apple’s true legacy:

Apple is getting ready to finish the first volume of its 10 year long opus on the true definition of “ecosystem”. With your iTunes ID, you can make sure any music, apps and books you purchase on your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad are automatically downloaded and synced on all your devices at once. If you start a document in Pages on Lion, it automaticaly saves each change and uploads it to iCloud, then syncs it back down to your iPad where you can work on it later at a coffee shop, or waiting for your train. No buttons are pressed to initiate the sync, no wire is required to transfer the files. Everything is done in the background without the user’s knowledge. Apple’s iCloud is one step closer to making “user error” a thing of the past and that’s the brush being used to paint the bigger picture.

That’s a thing a lot of people are missing about Apple’s plans and also the iterative nature of its OS evolution. Apple very rarely these days pushes massive new features, resulting in people screaming that everything past the original Mac OS X release has been a service pack. But things like Quick Look (instant, browsable previews of items in Finder) and upgrades to Preview (which has gone from Acrobat Reader Very Lite Indeed to a really good app for PDF edits, scanning and basic image manipulation) are attempts to make computing easier, a little at a time.

With iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion, though, Apple’s digital hub dream finally comes to fruition, but in a manner even Apple couldn’t have foreseen a decade ago. Assuming it works, you’ll get seamless computing across devices, a massive reduction in user error for tasks we take for granted but shouldn’t have to deal with (document sync, saving work on a regular basis), and that’s why people like Paul Thurrott look like dolts for dismissing what Apple’s doing as ‘more of the same’ or nothing different to the competition. It’s not about any one feature—it’s about everything. And until Microsoft, Sony and others get this, the playing field won’t be remotely even.