waffle

From Apple’s FCP X FAQ:

Can I hide Events that I am not working on? Yes. You can hide Events in Final Cut Pro X by moving them out of the Final Cut Events folder. In the Finder, navigate to the /Users/username/Movies folder and create a new folder. Then move the Events you are not using out of the Final Cut Events folder and into your new folder. The moved Events will no longer appear in Final Cut Pro X. If your Events are located on an external drive, you can move the Events to a new folder on that drive, or you can simply unmount the drive.

The PR-speak translator says: “Yes, by jumping through hoops”, which reduces to “no, not trivially”, which the hectic schedule of a video editor (five hours daily to edit videos, three to talk about Final Cut Pro) simplifies further to “hell no”.

I am a proponent of “value-added databases”. The filesystem is traditionally a very poor habitat for rapid metadata access. I appreciate the iTunes database, for example, since I wouldn’t want to slog around in the Finder (or waste energy laughing at the people who suggest that I only need to switch to Path Finder or, so help me, some sort of Commander). It gives me “things can be in multiple places at once without messing around with symlinks”. It gives me smart playlists. It gives me track ordering, for heaven’s sake.

However, that all depends on a good implementation of the database, just like the shrewdness of the filesystem depends on the particular filesystem. When Final Cut Pro X remakes iMovie’s mistake of “just listing everything” as if it’s appropriate because it worked in iTunes, it’s a hilarious lack of research or thought (or a recipe of Apple’s annoying “just work through it” tinge). When they offer solutions like these up without promising to fix them, it shows that they’re desperate.

The problem isn’t really that there’s a database of clips, the problem is that it does the wrong things. But by acting as if the problems don’t exist, Apple isn’t doing itself any favors in spreading the pretention that eliminating things that look like folder hierarchies is a worthwhile activity. And if people having to memorize file paths are bad, you just taught them a new one.

Here is my fundamental beef with every single piece of “social networking” software that has been universally adopted but passed me by: they aren’t social.

You know what I like? Weblogs, IM and email. Weblogs is an excellent way to disseminate writing. IM is an excellent way to actually have a conversation with people, although with the benefit of passing links along. Email is an excellent way to send less temporally bound, read-when-you-have-time messages that can sometimes carry the gravitas of an actual piece of mail. In any one of these, if you try to pull in people, you look like an ass.

On Twitter and in Facebook, the default is that you yell into a room and you don’t know whether anyone’s listening. There are friends lists and followers (which is still a creepy term), sure. But the default is to broadcast to everyone; Twitter gets this wrong twice: you’re a freak by restricting your tweets but engaging in public conversations with people who haven’t, and the alternative is to completely dance around the bulk of the system by using direct messages — everyone’s always in the room, and if you want some privacy, you have to whisper.

That’s not how people work. That’s not how to make people comfortable. It’s convenient as hell as long as you don’t think about it, which is why people use it. (Some people don’t care that everyone can hear them. You may have met some of them in a restaurant or carrying a mobile phone.) And don’t get me started on the feeling I get of being there just to endow their network with just a few more nodes.

This is why Google+ rings a bit more true to me. No one knows how this will shake out, whether people will really shy away from it just because Google is “nerdy” or a “utility company” or what have you. I don’t even know that much about how the entire system will work.

In any case, I do like a clear and central focus on recreating the group dynamic that’s the only form under which you can have an unforced conversation in real life. That’s where I think the term “social” goes from buzzword for “omg we have accounts and relations” to actually meaning something.

Update: After reading Stephen Levy’s inside scoop on Google+, it seems to me that Google has recognized the problem with market testing 41 shades of blue and inadvertently pissing on their designers. Let’s see if it sticks.

Brilliant fellow but occasional waffle commenter Lukas Mathis (LKM) wrote 344 of your dead tree pages on usability and called it “Designed for Use“.

Downloading unseen.

Hello, Black Pixel! I see you’ve acquired NetNewsWire. I like your stuff — although why wouldn’t I, your previous app literally had a big “42″ in the app icon; a genius move pulled by few others — and you seem clever, and clever enough to not always be too clever. I have high hopes for you.

I’ve been on the beta list now for years. I don’t mean to inundate you in my coalesced feature list during that time, although let’s just say I could easily do that. Instead, I want to attack something that affects me dearly every day. Not information overload, but tab rot and tab bankruptcy.

Here’s what happens:

• I come home from work and refresh all feeds.
• Lots of good stuff. I start going through them, opening the ones I think are interesting in new tabs.
• I start reading. There are probably 20-40 items (or even more on good days), where four or five or maybe even ten are really interesting and/or long, and the rest are cursory or ripe for skimming. I don’t start reading at the top of the tabs; there are already tabs from before, and NNW dutifully retains them. (Back when this feature was added, it was known as persistence and only Siracusa-level geeks would care about it; it’s now known as “Resume” and/or the new black in Lion. But I digress.)
• Occasionally, I go back to refresh the feeds and pick up even more items. Still continue reading.
• I jump up and down between the tabs in order to “skip” to the good parts. Combined with the periodical influx of new items, the constant jumping back and forth and not being constantly hinged to NNW during this entire process, I lose my place.
• I recall one item that I had really wanted to read and go to open it. In a well-intended feature, a new tab with the same URL doesn’t open; instead, the existing tab… well, does nothing, but prevents a duplicate tab. I have no idea where the original tab is, only that there’s a tab list within which there are dragons. Sometimes I go hunt for it. Sometimes I drag the link to the tab list to override and open a duplicate tab anyway. The “you opened a link” arrow animation (which is great) still plays anyway, or it would have been an indicator. Sometimes I figure out hours later that half of my items opened and half didn’t.
• I start to feel disoriented, like I’m missing some great item I had opened a while back. I eventually decide to pay it no heed and close NNW for today.
• The day after, I open NNW again and notice all the tombstoned tabs that were retained, exasperating the problem.
• Eventually, I go to Tab → Close All Tabs, notice the tab count (80-300 tabs, but sometimes higher) and start over.

Like the circle of life, this cycle repeats without abandon, although not set to Elton John.

If you want to be the best fucking news reader, fix this. Yes, go work on the “we think you like this” part; I want that too, as much as anyone. But never lose sight of the real, everyday, emergent problems, and take advantage of your fresh position — used to NNW, yes, but unbound by a legacy of releases and the hollering and discussing in the beta list — to come at this from a different angle.