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A few days ago, I came across an article called The Second Coming — A Manifesto by David Gelernter. Gelernter is famous for being a co-inventor of LifeStreams, which was a really cool PIM system based on time-order streams of documents.

In The Second Coming, written in 2000, Gelernter writes about a coming revolution in computing:

Computing will be transformed. It’s not just that our problems are big, they are big and obvious. It’s not just that the solutions are simple, they are simple and right under our noses. It’s not just that hardware is more advanced than software; the last big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen years ago, and today’s hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976. Users react to the hard truth that commerical software applications tend to be badly-designed, badly-made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves.

He dedicates an entire section of the essay to the problems he sees with the current file-and-folder organizational model:

27. Modern computing is based on an analogy between computers and file cabinets that is fundamentally wrong and affects nearly every move we make. (We store “files” on disks, write “records,” organize files into “folders” — file-cabinet language.) Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can take action.

[…]

30. If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.

31. Our standard policy on file names has far-reaching consequences: doesn’t merely force us to make up names where no name is called for; also imposes strong limits on our handling of an important class of documents — ones that arrive from the outside world. A newly-arrived email message (for example) can’t stand on its own as a separate document — can’t show up alongside other files in searches, sit by itself on the desktop, be opened or printed independently; it has no name, so it must be buried on arrival inside some existing file (the mail file) that does have a name.

I totally agree with the points he makes. These are things I’ve been complaining about for years, too.

Gelernter then goes on to describe (at a very high level) the organizational model that we should be using on computers:

36. File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We could model computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if we wanted to.

37. Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think of a face: you’ve retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) You can see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future. Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classify information when it is taken out. (Yesterday afternoon at four you stood with Natasha on Fifth Avenue in the rain — as you might recall when you are thinking about “Fifth Avenue,” “rain,” “Natasha” or many other things. But you attached no such labels to the memory when you acquired it. The classification happened retrospectively.)

Our minds are extraordinarily complicated things. Should we really be building software that is modeled on that kind of complexity?

Modeling machines after nature is rarely the best approach. Our airplanes don’t have flapping wings, and cars and bicycles are not “running machines.” You can also think of spoken and written languages as “tools”, ones that have an intimate connection with our thought processes. If languages were modeled on the way the mind works, we would be speaking in sentence fragments, and constantly making up new words to easily refer to concepts and past events. Would anyone argue that languages could be made better by making them more flexible, more malleable, and a better match for our internal thought processes?

To me, modeling computers on our minds is just as much of a red herring as modeling them on file cabinets. Let’s build software for how our brains work, not like how our brains work. The best tools are the ones that support and compliment our natural abilities. My brain doesn’t have an internal calendar or to-do list, but those turn out to be remarkably simple and effective constructs that support my goals of accomplishing certain tasks. They are effective because of how simple and straightforward they are, and because they allow my brain to focus on what it does best (which is not remembering absolute times or lists of items).

(Brain photo by Gaetan Lee on Flickr)

Sometimes it amazes me how difficult it is to do simple things on my computer.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve mentioned a few times the usability problems associated with downloading from the web (Uploading and downloading are seams in the web experience and Usability problems downloading from web apps). That’s exactly the same problem I ran into this morning.

What I want to do is download the slick Silk icon set. If you think about it, it’s really just a matter of copying a remote folder (containing the icons) to a spot on my hard drive. It should be as easy as a single drag-and-drop operation, just like copying a local folder would be. But it’s not. Here are the steps I have to go through:

1. Click on the link.
2. Choose to “open” or “save” the downloaded file. (It’s a ZIP file, so I choose to open it.)
3. In the ZIP application, choose to extract the files.
4. Navigate to the spot where I want to save the files, then click ok.
5. Now, to actually see the icons, I have to again navigate to the spot where I saved them.

Now maybe that doesn’t seem that bad, but compared to copying a local folder, it’s a lot of work to go through. Partly, it’s complicated by the fact that HTTP doesn’t support downloading folders, although if both the client and the server support GZIP compression, there’s no reason it couldn’t. Also, WebDAV clients can manage it, right?

My posts have been pretty Mozilla-centric for the last couple of weeks, and with Firefox 3 Beta 1 having dropped today, I see no reason to change that.

I’ve been running it for a couple of hours now, and here are some of my first impressions of the UI changes. For a more thorough review, check out Ars Technica.

First off, based on the concepts Alex posted about last week, the look and feel is going to change a lot before the final release. So, from a UI perspective, Beta 1 might be more properly considered to be an alpha.

The Good

No more lost edits

I’m happy to report that they’ve fixed the problem I wrote about last time. Previously, when a user selected to open (rather than save) a downloaded file, it was possible to save changes to the open document. That was a Bad Thing, because it the file was actually in a temp directory, and it meant that you could easily lose the changes that you’ve made. Now they’ve made downloaded files read-only, so when you try to save your changes, you will be prompted to save them to a different file in a more permanent location.

Password Manager

One of my long-time annoyances with previous versions of Firefox is that every time you log into a site, you’re presented with a modal dialog asking, “Do you want Firefox to remember the password for this site?” The modal dialog has been replaced with a nice, unobtrusive question in the notification area. Better still, if you ignore the message, it disappears after a few seconds. Slick. Jef Raskin would be proud.

Seeing Stars

One of the major new features of Firefox 3 (which I wrote about previously) is Places, which is unified system for dealing with bookmarks and your browsing history. In support of this, Firefox 3 introduces the concept of “starring” pages, much like in GMail. In theory, this is a very lightweight way of bookmarking pages. When you star a page, it you will see a star beside it when it appears in the autocomplete list, just like this:

I had hoped that the history sidebar would also show the star for pages that you have previously visited, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (yet).

Awesomebar

I mentioned the new “awesomebar” in a previous post. In short, it’s a modified autocomplete mechanism for the location bar. When you start typing, it tries to match the URL or title of previously visited pages. It’s also adaptive, based on the previous selections you have made.

So far it has worked nicely for me. I’ll have to use it for a bit longer before I can declare it to be “awesome”; for now it’s just the not-too-shabby-bar.

The Not-so-good, aka the Don’t-forget-it’s-just-a-beta

Lost in Places

Unifying bookmarks and history seems like a good idea, but I think that the front-end for the Places functionality needs some work. First of all, the star control is way off on the end of the location bar, in an area I’ve heard referred to as “the lucky charms”:

Personally I think it would be better to put this control immediately to the left of the location bar, similar to how it’s placed in GMail. To me, it is sort of lost where it currently is; but maybe that’s because I never use the RSS and Go buttons.

After you star a page, if you click on the star again, you’re presented with the following dialog:

I had a few problems with this. First of all, there’s no indication that the tags field accepts comma-separated tags. Second, it was not really clear to me what the “Delete” button meant. It might be clearer if it were labeled “Unstar”. Finally, it feels weird to me that the star is not a toggle. It has two completely separate behaviours, depending on what state it’s in.

Overall I find the new UI for bookmarks to be very confusing. There are now at least three different ways to bookmark a page: starring it, dragging the icon to the bookmark toolbar, and the old standby, Ctrl-D. When you press Ctrl-D, it actually brings up the star menu, as if you had clicked once to star the page and then clicked again to bring up the menu. So, at least that clarifies that bookmarking a page is the same as starring it. But I really think it would be better if they didn’t use two different terms to refer to the same thing. In fact, make that three — starred pages are accessed through an item named “Places” in the bookmarks menu:

Conclusion

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the beta. Firefox 3 has got quite a few nice, new features, and the guys at Mozilla are working hard to make the user experience second-to-none. I think the Places UI still needs a lot of work — one of the great things about Firefox has always been its simplicity, and I wouldn’t want them to lose that. But I’m confident that Mike, Alex, and the rest of the user experience team will be able to address these problems in time for the release.

My post yesterday on the upcoming changes in the Firefox download manager reminded me of a little story I wanted to tell. A few weeks ago, I said that uploading and downloading are seams in the web experience, and this story provides a good example of what I mean by that.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my room (probably at my computer), when I heard my roommate call me nervously from upstairs.

“Pat….?? Can you help me?”

I’d heard that tone of voice before.

“Is it about about your computer?”

“Um, yeah.”

So I went upstairs to help. Here was the problem: last night, she opened a Microsoft Word attachment from GMail, spent an hour or two editing it, saved it, and closed Word. Now, she was looking for the file, and it was nowhere to be found.

This has happened to me before, and I’ll bet that it’s happened to most people. When you download a file from GMail, you are prompted to either save or open the file. If you choose to save, the file will be downloaded to the desktop or your downloads folder (assuming you’re using Firefox). If you choose to open, the file will be downloaded to a temporary folder and opened from there. The problem is, if you choose to open the file, there’s nothing stopping you from merrily making all the changes you want and saving them back to the temporary file. Which is almost certainly not what you want to do.

It’s a tough problem, and probably not something that can be fixed in the web browser alone. But as we start relying more and more on web applications, I think it’s becoming an important problem to solve.

So what’s the right answer? First of all, I wonder if you should even be asked to choose between saving or opening the file. If you’ve clicked on it, don’t you probably want to open it? Once you’ve opened it, if you want to save it somewhere, then you can make the decision. This is the way that it works with PDFs if you’ve got Acrobat Reader installed.

Second, you shouldn’t be allowed to make changes to temporary files. If you are viewing a Microsoft Word document and then you try to save changes to it, it should then prompt you for a place to save the file, instead of silently saving the file to a temporary location.

Those are two possibilities that I can think of off the top of my head that might help fix this problem. Comments? Thoughts?

Oh, and just so I don’t leave you hanging — I helped my roommate rescue her changes from temp directory.

Via Mike Beltzner, I see that there are some cool new UI enhancements in the upcoming beta of Firefox 3.

First, the download manager has been completely re-written. A few weeks ago, I complained that uploading and downloading are seams in the web experience. One of the things I suggested was that the download window should allow drag-and-drop. Lo and behold, the new Firefox 3 download manager does! Check out the mockup, or bug 397655 for more details.

Second, Firefox 3 is introducing a new scheme called Places which is “a new system for storing bookmarks, history, and other information about pages.” One of the cool new UI enhancements related to Places is what’s being called the “awesome bar“. In Firefox 2 (as well as most other web browsers), when you type into the location bar, it autocompletes using pages from your history. When you get accustomed to it, it’s a great feature, because going to one of your commonly-visited sites is as quick as typing a few characters and then hitting tab. The awesome bar basically takes this functionality to the next level: it autocompletes from your history and your bookmarks, it searches all through the URL and the title (as opposed to just the start of the URL), and it’s adaptive. Edward Lee’s got a full description.

Overall, I’m really glad to see Firefox again taking the lead in the user experience side of things. Alex Faaborg has a list of some other user-facing changes planned for Firefox 3. That post is few months old though, so plans may have changed substantially since then.

Beta 1 should be dropping soon; I can’t wait to try it out.