Still wonder whether Amazon has the balls to take on Apple in the tablet space? With its newly launched Mac Software Downloads Store, competing head-on with Apple’s Mac App Store, you’d be crazy to think otherwise.

On the store itself, the good:

[D]ownloads are conveniently backed up in your Games and Software Library where you can download an unlimited number of times for personal use.

Download stuff whenever you want or need to.

The less-good:

Mac Download store features an install-less download process where the customer gets just the product without any unwanted extras, making for faster and easier purchases.

So these are straight downloads, with no client, and, clearly, standard licensing terms. Nonetheless, this is a ballsy move by Amazon, and it’s interesting that it’s pushing Office and Adobe products—things unlikely to arrive on the Mac App Store at all.

Nielsen Norman group has slammed gestural interfaces, in an article entitled A Step Backwards In Usability:

The usability crisis is upon us, once again. We suspect most of you thought it was over.

Given that two-year-olds and centenarians are using iPads, I did, yes.

Well you are wrong.

Oh.

In a recent column for Interactions (reference 2) Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces – “natural” they are sometimes called – well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated.

Violated? Sounds serious. SOMEONE CALL THE USER INTERACTION POLICE.

 

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INT: Nielsen Norman group. Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen get into their superhero outfits and zoom towards the scene.

Super Norman: OH MY GOD, it’s worse than we thought, Jackob. It’s horrific.

Super Nielsen: Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster. I will KILL THE VIOLATORS WITH MY LASER VISION.

Super Normal: You don’t have laser vision, Jakob.

Super Nielsen: Bugger. How about moaning about the iPad in my bi-monthly column for ACM CHI magazine, then?

Super Normal: Sounds great!

END CREDITS

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OK, *serious face*, these guys do have some good points regarding visbility, consistency, scalability and reliability—all standard tenets of strong usability. Gestures aren’t necessarily easily discoverable in iOS and other touch-based systems, but that’s also largely because many of them are new. Guidelines are, through popularity, slowly being formed. Nielsen Norman group also don’t seem to note that the intuitive nature of gestural interfaces (rather than the abstraction seen in other forms of computing) means that things are more easily learned and less likely forgotten. My dad can happily do stuff on my iPhone, despite not owning any iOS device, yet his Mac still regularly flummoxes him.

Anyway, back to the article:

The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.

No standards? Really? I’m pretty sure Apple has extensive guidelines on user interaction. But there are apparently other reasons people are having trouble.

The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

Yes. Let’s stop innovating.

The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

JUST STOP TRYING NEW THINGS, IGNORANT DEVELOPERS!

In comments to Nielsen’s article about our iPad usability studies, some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab.

ALTHOUGH IF YOU’RE RICH DEVELOPERS, WE PERMIT YOU TO EXPERIMENT IN YOUR ‘LAB’!

Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.

Bold explorations like the top-selling iPad and iPhone, you mean, rather than the sustained, small incremental steps we’d previously seen in smartphones and tablets? OK, sounds great. I’ll see you back before the turn of the century and we can party like it’s 1999 until we die of RSI through using our mice until our arms explode. I look forward to it.

Hat tip: Chris Brennan.

TechRadar:

The iPad 3 could launch with a Samsung-made AMOLED screen, if rumours that Apple has been in talks on the matter with Samsung execs are true.

But wait! An iPad 3 to launch towards the end of this year? That’s a rumour we haven’t heard for a while, but it’s one that doesn’t seem to be going away – does that mean there’s some truth in it?

John Gruber kickstarted the ‘iPad 3 in late 2011 rumour’ in February, and I thought it was unlikely, in part on the basis of iPad 2 supply issues and slow international rollouts. Apple somewhat sorted the latter but not the former, and since February we’ve also had increasing rumours that the iPhone 5 might not show up until the autumn, or even until 2012.

Apple ditching the strict annual update routine makes sense—it keeps everyone on their toes and stops stagnating sales at the end of a cycle. However, I’m still not convinced we’ll see another iPad revision this year. It seems too soon, could alienate new Apple fans who’ve recently bought an iPad 2, and we’ve not seen an iPhone update since last year.

Of course, Apple’s hand might be forced, if a competitor rolls out a tablet with a Retina-style display, although most seem content of creating tablets thicker than the iPad that happen to run Flash and cost the same. Aside from that, I’d think it more likely we’ll see another iPhone later this year and the iPad 3 early in 2012.

Ian Betteridge offers a savvy take on modern computer purchase:

If there’s one thing that the huge demand for netbooks a few years ago proved, it’s that people buy because they can see how a computer can do something for them, not on megahertz.

In the case of netbooks, the “something” was being a machine they could carry everywhere, and do simple stuff on. In the case of Macs, it’s having access to easy to use, powerful software like iPhoto, iMovie, and so on – in a package that’s good looking, well designed, robust, and so on.

This continues through to tablets. There’s a lovely comment I recall reading from a teenager who said they wanted an iPad rather than a netbook, because you could “do more” with the iPad. Geeks would spit out their coffee at such a remark, reel off a tech-specs list, burble on about installing any app, ever (preferably on Linux) and get all huffy about someone buying a tablet, especially one from Apple and its walled garden.

The reality is most people really don’t give a crap about bullet-points. They just want to do things. With the iPad, they see all these adverts that show people making music, finger-painting, creating office documents, playing games, with hugely intuitive interfaces, on a device that’s sleek and shiny. Apple doesn’t need to bang on about the amount of RAM the iPad has, or the A4 chip’s speed—it’s all about what you can do, creatively, productively, or as a consumer. Until the competition figures that out, they’ll have a tough time catching Apple in the tablet space, and also a tricky time stopping Apple from nibbling away at marketshare for laptops and even desktop PCs.

Ryan Carson:

Google has used their insanely smart engineers to create an image compression algorithm that’s just as good as JPEG but 39.8% smaller. It’s called WebP and it’s pronounced “weppy”. You can create WebP images in Acorn, Pixelmator, ImageMagick, Leptonica and XnConvert. If you use Photoshop, you can also install the WebP plugin.

The problem is it’s currently only supported by Chrome and Opera, but if all of us in the web community make enough noise, we might succeed in getting it to be adopted by all major browsers.

Ryan’s a smart guy, but I’m curious as to why he’s fighting so hard for WebP, because, bar some slightly superior compression to JPEG—although the quality of said compression is often very subjective—it offers no real benefits and lots of drawbacks.

Jeff Muizelaar:

WebP also comes across as half-baked. Currently, it only supports a subset of the features that JPEG has. It lacks support for any color representation other than 4:2:0 YCrCb. JPEG supports 4:4:4 as well as other color representations like CMYK. WebP also seems to lack support for EXIF data and ICC color profiles, both of which have be come quite important for photography. Further, it has yet to include any features missing from JPEG like alpha channel support. These features can still be added, but the longer they remain unspecified, the more difficult it will be to adopt.

Where does that leave us? WebP gives a subset of JPEG’s functionality with more modern compression techniques and no additional IP risk to those already shipping WebM. I’m really not sure it’s worth adding a new image format for that.

I agree. I’d love to know why people think we should care about WebP. I was very happy when PNG was broadly supported, due to the clear benefits in web design, such as alpha channels. But slightly better compression in a format that actually offers less flexibility? That’s an odd thing to fight for.

There are signs things might change, with Google making promises at IO for new features, but even then WebP still feels like a solution looking for a problem that would be better solved with PNG adding another compression stream.