In fact, if a user actually asks you, with their mouths or their keyboards, then you should be grateful: especially if they ask nicely. Most users won’t say anything: they’ll plod along, fightig against your software’s behaviour, until the cost in time eventually far outweighs the benefits. Then they’ll move on, and you’ll never know. That user has gone, and similar users like them are about to take their leave too: if only you’d known; if only they’d said something; you could have spent time listening to them—maybe accommodating them, maybe negotiating with them—but at the very least letting them inform their future design.

Open-source projects, for all their community spirit, can be really quite awful to their less technically savvy user base. As an example, here’s a paraphrasing of a thread regarding a minor user annoyance with the Psi jabber client:

A: something’s happening with your software that didn’t happen in a previous version. It’s a bit annoying, but I know from its past behaviour that it doesn’t have to be this way, and I can’t see any strict requirement for it. How do I turn it off? I clearly love your sofftware and want to help you with this useability problem.

B: this is by design. Why are you asking this question?

A: OK, so it’s default behaviour. But how do I switch it off?

C: what you as a user experienced as good useability in a previous version is actually what we consider a bug, so we’ve excised it. I’m not going to tell you how to switch it off. If you want to get rid of it, you have to do something that you’d never guess from any error reporting or prompting, and something that you don’t strictly by any specification have to do. And every other user has to do this too. Either that or develop modal dialog fatigue: I don’t care.

A: I don’t think this would suit all users. How do I switch it off?

D: Hey! I’m a random other user, and I’d like to switch it off too. So that means there’s a user base out there that doesn’t like this product’s behaviour. We’ve got critical mass! Great, huh? OK, let’s go!

C: Well, I’m still not going to suggest it be fixed, even though I’m tacitly acknowledging that this behaviour is annoying and people don’t want it. But here’s a way of working around it by doing some obscure bit of programming on the Jabber server. If you aren’t the person in charge of jabber.org, tough luck, you prole.

C: moreover, if users don’t behave in exactly the same way I behave and I expect them to behave then they can all go and boil their stupid heads.

E: I hate users that don’t behave like me too! I can’t believe we’re having this discussion! I have some vague and hard to justify moral investment in making everyone behave like me, so I’m going to pretend nobody else wants it to change either, and ridicule those who do. As far as I’m concerned software is built to change how people who use it behave, until they’re more like me, and I don’t care who it annoys. How hard can it be for every single person using this software to work around how the software works?

D: Probably harder than one programmer making the software work around how users currently behave. Can we not even make it an option? Wouldn’t that satisfy everyone involved?

E: right, that’s it. Consider my toys thrown out of the pram. I find your real-world user behaviour pathetic. Come back to this community when you’re more like me.

I’ve used a lot of hyperbole there compared to what’s actually written down, but… there’s a sort of zeal that runs through the naysaying comments on that thread. And why not: they’re putting the users of the Jabber client doubly to rights. Not only are they making them behave properly when they use Jabber, but they’re making them think properly on the forums too!

It’s only one example, of course; but it’s a microcosm of a much greater problem. Open-source software projects begin because people scratch their own itches; to continue and be of widespread use, they have to scratch other people’s itches too.

In the mean time I’ve finally followed Tom’s advice (which I didn’t take when he volunteered it at the time) and upgraded Wordpress to a subversion checkout of 2.6+ . It was no more painful than the previous upgrade, and looks like being a much simpler procedure in future owing to subversion’s interface for switching versions.

Why this might be a plug, although it probably isn’t

I’ve also been waiting to categorically declare a very minor conflict of interest, which I can now do: yesterday a lovely paper copy of the Google Chrome comic arrived in my letterbox. So if you think I’m blogging because of that, you can navigate elsewhere now.

Certainly a product’s incompatibility with X/Linux would normally make me avoid it, so perhaps I have being persuaded by the marketing. But a large part of Chrome is marketing, and what makes it most interesting is what it reveals about Google’s marketing internals and about whether or not they matter; but more about that later.

How Google Chrome feels and acts

The ever-lucid Jon Hicks has already posted some thoughts, so my delay in writing has saved me time on that score. I don’t have a great eye for design, but I feel like Chrome’s appearance is interesting if less revolutionary than the promotional material might suggest. Tabs sit in a blue surrounding background, making them look like a half-hearted IE7 reskin. Menus have, as in IE7, been relegated to two weird buttons on the right of the address bar. Full-screen mode is nice, though, as the tabs sit over the top window bar, combining Windows chrome and Chrome chrome—does that make sense?—to increase the window size.

Browsers are browsers and, as with word processors and spreadsheet software, they should really be free and open-source by now, leaving proper software companies with time to develop the next generation of applications. So in a sense most of what Google Chrome does, it does well: unobtrusively and unremarkably, and that’s how it should be; but quite hard to comment on. What’s most noticeable is the speed: it’s faster than any browser I’ve used on XP, ever. Opening new tabs and windows—although in Chrome there’s very little difference under the hood, as they’re all processes—is nippy, despite the extra overhead that Google have decided is essential to Chrome’s distributed stability. Pulling a tab out of one window; letting it drop as a new window, or dropping it into a different window; maximizing windows and general rendering of content: these are all sharp and impressive. But again, they shouldn’t be as obvious as they are, and it merely reflects on other browsers that Chrome feels so fast.

There’s a kind of Firebug-like inspector in Chrome, and it’s nice enough, although it ought to be extracted as a plugin before long, otherwise my guess is it will end up neglected. And popup blocking—represented in the promotional bumf as the window swallowing the popup, and you the user pulling it out in a reactive way—is just a case of a popup window appearing in the main tab so that only its bar is visible. There’s no obvious feeling of resistance as you pull the hidden window up to be visible. Maybe that’s the point, but after the reaction of tab dragging and dropping you feel like you’re moving popups around using an entirely different UI. Also, as I’ve just discovered, text search doesn’t look in form textareas, which makes proofreading your blogposts difficult.

Generally, though, Chrome has at least run rings around anything that Microsoft can produce in the browser market, and then Google managed to completely open-source the code which, like some old John McCain company, Microsoft can neither do nor understand why it should. It’s astonishing to see one huge company outmanoeuvre another like this, and suggests interesting times still ahead

What packaging Chrome has been wrapped in

As regards the marketing, Google has also managed to completely confound the other big player Microsoft is intent on gradually rebranding itself as something in between the silver-and-blueblack chunky mens’ toiletries packaging that make it acceptable to possess both moisturisers and Y chromosomes, and transparent, flashy interfaces of the sort that IE6 always fucks up and means web developers have to work around. Google, on the other hand, has essentially presented itself through Chrome as a kind of retro-yet-futuristic 1950s take on a science-fiction OSX, all meals-in-a-tablet and egg-shaped seats.

Much of this has been down to the artistic skills of Scott McCloud. I never know what to think about him. On the one hand he’s got this unique, flowing, clean style that’s something like a scrubbed Daniel Clowes; on the other, his drawings can sometimes feel washed out, pretentious and affected. On the one hand, he’s tried to revolutionize the way that people think about comics, often by exposing what good comics have been doing for years; on the other, very few people have got rich on the micropayment model he espouses, and if it isn’t working for musicians it’s unlikely to work for graphic novelists.

Where that backlash came from

By portraying itself as different from other industry behemoths—which, to be fair, it is in some ways—Google has left itself in a bind. It still has shareholders, and on one level legally has to conduct itself as a responsible company, however much it wants to be treated like, or possibly with, Ubuntu. Fronting what’s essentially a business exercise with a divisive figure like McCloud leaves you ripe to parody, and The Register has tried to step in with Google Chrome comic funnies. They fly in the face of the no-alteration Creative Commons licence that Google/McCloud released the work under, but that’s fine because the uniquely American concept of fair use lets them do that if it’s satire.

Except they don’t work as satire, because they’re not funny. And yet at the same time the font they’ve used makes it look eerily reminiscent of the shockingly explicit Jerk City, which hints at a far better way of parodying the style: the 4chan/yayhooray parodies are in a way more honest and hence funnier: probably because they’re more anarchic and less interested in squeezing out another humourless Googlebashing.

No product launch is smooth, and there’ve been bumps in the otherwise smooth journey that Chrome has made to mass testing (if not mass acceptance). The end-user licence turned out to contain mad MyPlace-like terms of use which was sort of an accident, although it’s drawn attention to the fact that they still exist in other Google products. Whoops. The original beta—or, given that everything from Google is a beta, maybe we should just call it an alpha and be done—was susceptible to Safari-like carpetbombing, and The Register criticized the rather flaky bugfix and its rollout procedure.

I love el Reg and its journalistic instincts. It’s more than happy to puncture someone’s silly bubble, and it displays a dogged tenacity in pursuing the “real” story: although they’re basically wrong about climate change, in the way that Private Eye turned out to be wrong about MMR; and their grammar and sub-editing is atrocious for an outlet that considers itself to be conducting serious journalism.

But I think they’re being unfair on Google: what other open-source product would launch to such scrutiny? What other product has had seamless security procedure baked into it from its alpha, and why should that matter? Google are big, but they can only cover so many bases: there’s so much infrastructure glossed over by McCloud’s comic, and maybe a FOSS-like boring list of features and a changeset would have led people to underestimate less the sheer amount of stress testing, and the sheer amount of work that can only now be stress-tested, now there’s a user base and the animosity of the press to contend with.

Google did after all still manage a big reveal—only two weeks before London’s own Google Developer Day—in their usual manner. But I do wonder about the timing. Was there a danger in letting crowds into Google UK while Chrome was still secret? Did someone want Chrome to be out—prematurely, if need be—for the coup of having people drool over it at a GDD? Was the news about to leak anyway, and did damage limitation dictate the software’s release? If that’s the case, though… does it matter? Google gets its theatre; the world gets an interesting FOSS project; early adopters get an unstable pre-release: everyone’s happy. Ish.

Which hand is on Google’s tiller

Pessimistic journalists—and in my honest-to-goodness opinion there’s no better sort—always point to Google’s lack of revenue from its non-core offerings and suggest that it’d be far better for Google to concentrate on the products that directly earn it money. But they forget that Google’s profitless products exist as a perpetual rebranding and repositioning of Google: indirectly, they maintain Google’s status as a company that other companies, developers and end users actively want to be associated with, and actively trust. While they’ll never entirely remove the patina and dust collecting on their “don’t be evil” statement, they can at least act like a company that trusts open source, and whom open-source communities trust in turn.

Google can keep on pushing things like Chrome out, and its launch cycle can be dictated by something other than the developers’ whims, because: its main rival has nothing like Chrome, or GMail, or Google Docs; and successful FOSS projects like Django or Ubuntu have hardly suffered from bleeding-edge alphas or crotchety betas, as long as community, or honesty, or image, has been there to prop them up.

Who the hell am I to be telling you this anyway

I quite like Chrome. But I completely accept that receiving personalized communication from the company taints my status as a reliable blogger. So don’t take my opinion on Chrome at face value.

I certainly won’t: I’m about to reboot into a proper operating system, and I’ll lose Chrome as I do so. It’s a nice addition to the existing ranks of browsers, but not that nice.

This model of publishing in part explains the thinking behind his recent post, robustly titled Business Requirements are Bullshit. But Steve’s audience—compared to the web at large—is a small, self-selecting group. So although keeping in mind some of the details of his recent post can prevent you investing in dead-end projects, I just can’t agree with the overall conclusions about software development.

Although it’d be nice for everyone in the world to have programming skills, and to be able to behave like autonomous itch-scratching units, that simply isn’t the case. The vast majority of people need software built for them, and software builders are a demographic, with a broad range of shared interests and a vast landscape of shared uninterests. What if you can’t program but you want some software? Do you just sit there, or do you pay someone to build software for you? Should that person in turn refuse the money, saying “that’s too risky: Steve said so?”

Steve’s rant is aimed at CEOs instead, but the principle still stands. To what extent to people have to clamour for a particular feature before a CEO will say “well, I don’t want that, but I do want your money?” Personal phone calls? Petitions to their local MPs? Pre-ordering? Pressing themselves against the windows of electronics shops and drooling on the glass? Demanding it be available on the welfare state? Well, the canny software house would have started building the software before any of the above had happened. But how could they know, if they’re not secretly telepathic? Well, among other methods, by gathering business requirements.

From Steve’s point of view it’s less of an issue, because he works at Google, the House of Blue Sky Development. And I don’t begrudge him that privileged viewpoint at all, because Google has earned the business success that bankrolls schemes like twenty-percent time projects. If every business had oodles of cash to throw at developers as they wander off along tangential projects, then maybe none of them would need to through half an oodle at a discovery phase. But as long as money is a locally limited and unevenly distributed resource, then there will need to be different solutions to the problem of working out what to actually build.

The ultimate direction of software development proposed by Steve is just far too exclusive, and it’s been the bane of open-source projects for years. Project after project caters for its tiny community, never reaching out to what other communities might need; they start to cool off, then founder; the codebase is mothballed, and the project finally expires. Worse, in Steve’s world, we’d have to wait for blind people and RSI sufferers to write their own FOSS voice recognition software: maybe the blind person could hold the keyboard and mouse, while the RSI sufferer tells them what’s on the screen. Meanwhile, able-bodied programmers develop that sort of stuff for Vista without a qualm, and they can charge the earth for it because people want it.

Ubuntu’s recent successes might be almost entirely attributed to the fact that (a) the project is well managed and directed and (b) they reach outside their own community, and solve problems for people other than computer programmers. Despite Ubuntu, Gartner recently announced that Linux had a 4% market share. 96% of consumers opt for software built by people who on the whole weren’t solving their own problems.

The first commenter on Steve’s recent post says:

I find that a lot of Free Software is awful for exactly this reason — the authors built it for themselves. Their software only works for other hardcore programmers because they can put up with the same complex implementation and integration problems and not even notice them, and if it’s not quite right they lose a million potential worldwide users for every mistake.

The recent success of Ubuntu as Open Source Software shows that a lot of other projects still don’t get it. The first thing an OS community needs is outreach: scratching other people’s itches and not their own.

Actuallly, he says almost exactly the opposite, but then: he emails people with patches, so he’s probably a software author himself. At the very least, he’s in that four percent, preaching to the rest of the already converted. Meanwhile, the rest of the market went thataway. And if Warren Buffett were to take a break from spreading thickly his easily-believed homespun down-to-earth nonsense for a minute or two, what would he really do to capture that 96%?

Last week, I was talking with Joe about how certain things have made the leap from content to chrome. (”Chrome” is what Mozilla developers call the browser interface around the content pane — the tabs and menus and location bar and so on.) It used to be that you could only find feeds by looking for special icons within web pages themselves. Now all modern browsers support feed autodiscovery tags, and they expose the feeds in menus and icons within the chrome area of the browser. So you don’t need to litter your pages with feed icons; feed autodiscovery allowed them to make the jump from content to chrome.

Nobody should ever have to see a link to your site’s main RSS feed, still less click on it. They certainly shouldn’t have to be shown a link to that feed, on the same page as the feed’s HTML equivalent. All major modern browsers highlight implicit, header-embedded RSS feeds for you, in their chrome. If a given site visitor is the sort of person to use RSS, they’ll see that icon, and won’t need yours however much it looks like a Diesel Sweeties T-shirt.

Arguably, print links are also pointless page-junk, and should be disposed of long before the next/previous links that Mark stridently goes on to condemn. However, web users have been let down so often by site production, and are still suspicious that the page will be created without media-specific CSS, and even with format-polluting tables. The print-page browser buttons currently don’t even warn you if there’s no stylesheet for print media, or if page layout is predominantly tabular, so there’s no user trust in the browser’s native print methods. This is where Jakob Nielsen might step in front of Edward Tufte, as Aristotle discusses in the comments on Joe Tomyako’s blog. In comparison, the RSS icon in the browser’s chrome is an indication to the site visitor that the pages they’re dealing with were put together with a little more care than the average, and can therefore be trusted with implicit-only RSS links.

I have to confess that this Wordpress theme isn’t perfect in that respect: the header-embedded tag on archive pages links to the main RSS feed only, and so to compensate there are RSS links in the navigation to the right. If I had time I would find a better theme, or possibly build my own: if I had time, and if I were more like Mark Pilgrim.

Matthew Somerville is well known for his accessible takes on rubbish websites: most useful is Traintimes, a layer on top of one of the equally poor commercial British rail sites; most notorious is Accessible Odeon, a fixing of the Odeon Cinema’s website that put their own substandard development to shame so much that in 2004 they had Matthew’s version taken down with legal threats. Remember: just because you’re successful doesn’t mean you’re not stupid.

Recently, Matthew gave an OGN talk on split tickets. These are train journeys which one cross-country train company sells at exhorbitant rates, whereas the components of the journey can be bought separately from the local companies for considerably less. This is what we infer; the rail websites try to keep it all quiet, in the hope that you might lose interest and stump up. The whole headshakeworthy situation is either a stinging indictment of the stupidity of privatizing a rail network and making passengers jump through ridiculous hoops to glean even the tiniest advantage, or a perfect demonstration of how the choice-enriched consumer can leverage capitalism in action: take your pick.

To come to the point: Matthew has set up a wiki where people have been adding the split tickets they’ve worked out in an ad-hoc fashion. Last Sunday I added K’s astonishing 47% saving for Oxford–Cardiff to the end of it, and there’s been little activity since. The page hasn’t got fantastic Google juice—”split tickets” means too many other things—and is just non-dynamic HTML, editable through the wiki but otherwise searchable only by eye.

At the moment, of course, there’s no reason for Matthew to expend any more effort on such a small and barely popular data set. But last Sunday I had a sudden instinctive jolt, to the effect that: more people would be likely to take advantage of split tickets if there was an easier way of looking up other people’s discoveries (my colleagues were recently trying to find split tickets and the wiki page was harder to use than Traintimes, for that very purpose).

With this in mind, here’s my take on accessificating the wiki page: Spliticket. It accesses a cached version of the page, and then using Python’s HTMLParser to hack away at the HTML it returns either a HTML or XML representation of any journey it finds. The idea is that it’s a bit easier to use on your mobile device, and lets you pin down journeys better. I’ve also included an option for searching strictly for the same journey: I’m not sure if split tickets—even returns—always work when the journey is reversed.

Spliticket also supports friendly URLs (inspired by Traintimes itself), so York to Edinburgh in HTML becomes <http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/spliticket/html/york/edinburgh/> and the aforementioned Oxford to Cardiff route in XML becomes: <http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/spliticket/xml/oxford/cardiff/> .

Mostly this was just something to fill idle hours, and also to convince myself of some ideas I’ve had recently about loose coupling, data reuse and open data. Hopefully at the same time (a) Matthew won’t take it as a dig, (b) others might find some casual use for it see it, and (c) a select few might see it as a testament to the ease of freeing information from solid if unsemantic markup. And maybe in six months’ time we’ll all be booking split tickets as a matter of course; by then, of course, Spliticket will probably be gratefully obsolete, replaced by the fully-fledged application that poor, embittered rail passengers deserve. I’m sure Matthew will build it if so.

(With any luck D6 still contains my three characters of contribution fixing OpenID autodiscovery.)

The comparison in the Guardian website is with Facebook (which is turning rapidly more socially evil by the minute anyway). I think it would be more illuminating to compare mySociety sites with such large, government-commissioned (and consultant-propelled) projects like the NHS Spine.

The Spine is a vast, overarching superproject; it’s a messy amalgam of large, penny-pinching businesses; separation of responsibilities—bizarrely—is in part geographical, so despite purporting to provide a single system there’s no guarantee (outside of the weird steampunk astrolabe brains of consultants) that Yorkshire and Humber will be able to chat freely with the West Midlands. It’s been put together without any real thought about whether the problems tackled are the ones that the problem-sufferers (NHS staff and patients) encounter most often. In a nutshell, i’s overblown, overpriced and over the top.

But if mySociety had been brought in? You would have around a dozen projects, all quite tiny, and all solving fairly simple, easily-scoped problems. Most importantly, they would all stem from consulting the staff: each would have a valid reason for existing before even the planning began. The basic version of each site would be ready within six weeks, and a more polished version in three months. There’d be ongoing updates and improvements as user requests made them appear worth while ((the Spine, on the other hand, would shudder at the thought that the hoi polloi of front-line employees might dictate project direction, rather than a consultancy firm). And from the point of view of an end result, almost everything would be ready by now, in comparison to a couple of fringe benefits: it would be improving staff and patient experience today, across the country, in those specifically targeted areas, by a hundred times the effect the Spine will have, and for a hundredth of the cost.

mySociety produces perfect examples of the open-source maxim: find an itch, and scratch it. But what distinguishes them from almost every other FOSS project (apart from perhaps Ubuntu) is that they’re happy to treat other people’s itches.

One big problem is vacation programs, aspects of your email provision that permit automated emails on your behalf to say “I’m not here right now.” They’re horrible, all of them. Outlook Express’ system only runs when your desktop is switched on: imagine the cheery post-seasonal look on your face as you return to work after two weeks away, power up your computer and then watch everyone who’s sent you an email for the past two weeks suddenly get an email each, per email they sent, before you can hit “cancel, for the sake of the newborn baby Jesus!” Outlook’s and Exchange’s equivalents merrily reply to any old bulk mailing list, leading to incredibly annoyed readers of the same address until someone takes matters into their own hands and either unsubscribes the offender or hunts them down, ties them to a post and shoots them in the head. Even the *nix .vacation is pretty grim, and you have to be careful not to set up some sort of nightmarish positive-feedback loop and bring down a server.

It occurred to me that it would be nice for subscription management systems to let you unsubscribe for a bit. The idea is that you’d let them tick a box at the point of unsubscription, and it would set a scheduled task to run in, say, two or three weeks’ time and resubscribe them. That would in a sense trump all the current user experiences when it comes to making sure you’re absent from all your mailing lists for the vacation duration. It would be fairly easy to do, because after a prompt from cron on the right date it could pretty much run off all the existing subscription code by calling a URL internally (and hence not requiring CAPTCHA or validation).

And then I realised: the people who would best benefit from the functionality wouldn’t even think to look for it. They’d just keep on telling all their fellow readers that they want to unsubscibe.

Bizarrely, if you open “Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager”, and click on “View > Show hidden devices,” then there’s a Non-Plug and Play Driver for a service called “Beep”. And, unlike most XP services, this one does exactly what it says. It beeps. And beeps. Whenever a system beep is needed, Beep is there, with its full-volume flava and rich, screeching aroma! Disable it and reboot, or do something more clever if you need to.