What the hell happened to the 3-series?

While my beloved little Rataxes is having its windshield spray pump repaired, and hopefully finally having the wiring in its driver-side front speaker fixed (fourth time’s a charm!), the guys at the service center were kind enough to loan me a new 3-series for a few days.

I’m speechless. With the latest redesign, BMW have absolutely ruined this car.

And what a car to ruin! The 3-series has so much pedigree, easily racking up more awards than anything else in its category, consistently, over decades. I’ve had driving experience in an E90, and briefly in an E92 and E46, and loved them all. By comparison, this new F30… is just bad. BMW have started with a car that for so long dominated the sports sedan market… and made it feel cheap.

Indulge me a little rant here…

The build quality’s terrible – every single panel in the cabin, from the sunroof shade to the center console, feels tinny and flimsy. They’ve used much thinner plastic for everything, and the result is a car that feels hollow and insubstantial everywhere you touch it. One of the taillights is falling off. After only 2,000 miles!

Apparently, there’s a recall for this

The cabin’s badly designed – they’ve removed the pouch in the center console, and the one in front of the gearstick has been replaced by a hatch whose cover hides two cupholders. Stunningly, the hatch cover doesn’t slide away: it pulls off completely, and they suggest you throw it in the glove box when it’s off. There’s no longer an obvious place for storing things like sunglasses.

To use the cupholders, remove this hatch and... find somewhere to put it

The seats are uncomfortable. The steering’s loose. The suspension wallows. The outsize key is twice the size it used to be, and there’s nowhere to slot it into to store and recharge it while driving (just let it rattle in the door pocket, or bulge in your own pocket). I couldn’t find a way to have the courtesy lights come on automatically when you stop driving. The engine shakes the car like never before. The speedo has no gradations more precise than 10mph markings.

I’m amazed the thing only has 2,000 miles on it. My grunty little 1-series had 8,000 when I bought it, and it felt and drove like a much newer car. Now 43,000 miles old, in some ways it still does.

It’s hard to believe BMW made a car that’s just so much worse than the ones they used to sell. The 3-series of old were such great models, I’ve still got a lot of goodwill to BMW. Here’s hoping they put the F30 out of its misery, soon.

That diem wasn’t going to carpe itself (Update)

It’s been just over a year since I left Sony and about ten months since I started work on my new app/web service, and though I’m still in stealth mode, I’m getting close to being able to share more details. It’s been quite a while since I last blogged about it, and felt it’s time to show some progress...

For a few months I’ve been bringing up a pre-alpha codebase for a web client and server. It’s based on Meteor, and has a live deployment on Amazon AWS, with access currently restricted to a few user testing volunteers who have been helping me refine the UX.

Separately, more recently I’ve been working with an iOS developer friend to bring the app to the iPhone. Feature-wise, it’s currently less advanced than the web version, but it’s early days yet, and we’ve been focusing on some of the more experimental, novel features of the UX, rather than churning through implementation of the more traditional elements.

I’m thrilled to now have one of Silicon Valley’s most highly regarded law firms on retainer, and in the next few days I’ll be working with them to incorporate a new company. It’s a really exciting development, and crosses a major threshold: writing large checks. Up to now, my only project expenses have been small things like iOS developer access, a tiny Amazon server and a font. This has been my first call to really show commitment to the project.

On a personal note, I wanted to share one little nugget of experience from working on my own for the past twelve months or so:

Having complete freedom and independence is a double-edged sword.

As an office worker, I think it’s easy to fantasize about the freedoms afforded to those working from home. You can escape the drudgery of sitting in your car/train/subway/bus for an hour a day, perhaps interminable interruptions, or maybe a feeling that someone’s looking over your shoulder much of the time. For me, there’s an additional factor: productivity, I find, often comes in waves. Some days in an office I’ll feel massively enthused and creative and end up working super-late; other days I could be in completely the wrong headspace and achieve very little. In an office environment, there’s a heavy burden of peers’ expectations forcing me to stay in and at least make an appearance during office hours, regardless of how little I might be achieving, whereas if I were to just go home early or take an impromptu day off, I might recharge the productivity battery much quicker. Certainly, grinding gears in a cubicle for the sake of it makes matters worse, not better. And I know that the guilt associated with leaving super-early is just in my head, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

That said, working by oneself for extended periods really isn’t fun. Offices are more than just a place to get work done: they’re spaces where people get to share discussions on what’s going on (relevant discussions, that will actually help with your projects!), bounce ideas of each other, support each other, and share some good times. You won’t have a water cooler discussion working from home, and, frankly, they’re really important.

…Which segues nicely to an announcement: I’m now seeking partners to join me in building this concept up from a personal project to a fully-fledged, customer-facing business. I think there’s a huge opportunity, and seizing it will mean moving quickly with a talented, experienced team.

I’m looking primarily for people who, like me, have cut their teeth working at larger, successful companies, and who relish the idea of changing the world through a small, passionate and ambitious team.

In particular, the skills I’m looking for are:

• Mobile programming: iOS development primarily, with Android a close second. 
• Web programming: desktop and mobile.
• Back-end coding and admin: initially I’m looking for someone who can cover the gamut from server-side coding (Javascript) to deployment, maintenance and DBA (MongoDB).
• UI/UX/Graphic design: for mobile and web front-ends, as well as company branding and image.
• Community management/PR/marketing: for user acquisition, community support, evangelism, and company communications.

I won’t underplay the challenges: this is a high-risk opportunity. If that appeals to you, or if you know anyone, I’d love to hear from you!

The GUIs of Insecurity

It’s not that uncommon to anthropomorphize software by giving it a humanlike demeanor. An easy-to-use app might be said to be ‘friendly’, while less well-designed ones may be called ‘unstable’, ‘unforgiving’ or ‘unresponsive’. Those negative personality traits are probably far more numerous than the positive ones, and I’m sure that says nothing good about our industry.

But there’s one personality disorder that doesn’t get called out much for software, and it’s getting more grating all the time: insecurity.

One of Windows 95’s less celebrated innovations was the outlet it gave for the less self-assured application to put its personality disorders permanently on display. I refer of course to the system tray, that veritable dumping ground of iconic anxiety, whereby any random piece of software could stake claim to a square centimeter of prime real estate at the bottom-right of your screen.

For some reason, developers must have felt that if everybody else’s app had tattooed itself onto the poor users’ screens, then by gosh theirs should too! Never mind that the only tenuous excuse they could think of for putting a control there was to tweak some random parameter of some random driver for some random piece of hardware that never really needed tweaking in the first place. Dammit, somebody wrote that driver, and he wasn’t about to let you forget it!

And everybody was doing it. Even the folks who really should have known better. If I told you that Apple gave Quicktime a system tray icon, do you think you could imagine any circumstance in which you’d actually want to use it?

But it got worse: as time went on, it wasn’t just the apps you’d installed that were awkwardly trying to crash your office lunch group: PC vendors had resorted to shoveling mountains of pre-installed crapware on new machines to make up for in kickbacks what they were losing out on from increased price competition. And these ones really had a complex.

Microsoft’s solution? Indulge them further. The insecure application running under Windows XP (or was it 2000?) no longer had to content itself with quietly whimpering in the corner hoping that you’d notice it: a new notifications API gave its system tray icons a fully-fledged bark!

Any application, cognizant that its nondescript splodge of color in the system tray wasn’t providing the best possible utility to end users, now had a chance to prove just how useful it could be by spontaneously throwing obsequious messages in your face in the vain hopes that you’d finally pat its back and call it a good dog.

Leading that charge was Microsoft itself:

That document that you wanted sending to the printer? The one that you hit the ‘Print’ button in the ‘Print’ dialog for? I’ve gone and sent it! Just like you wanted! You might have forgotten which printer you told me to send it to, so here’s a reminder. Aren’t I useful? I can even tell you the precise second at which I sent it! And don’t think I’ve forgotten what year it is!

And though it looks like they’re starting to learn that constant bombardment of unnecessary information doesn’t make for a good experience…

Credit: Windows Dev Center - Desktop, Notifications (MSDN)

 …it turns out they haven’t learned at all.

Yes, that’s right. No superfluous information here. Not now that we’ve truncated the filename. (ibid.)

But here’s what gets my goat…

The explosion of mobile apps over the last (wow, has it been that long?) seven years has, predictably, given rise to a whole new pandemic of software anxiety disorders, and with notifications being an even more prominent feature for always-on mobile apps than they ever were for desktop apps, the pressure on many a young app to prove its worth through impromptu outbursts of unsolicited information is more than most can bear.

But being a trend doesn’t make it trendy. You’d think that a confident, self-assured, successful tech company would appreciate that, right? If all its friends were jumping off a bridge, surely there’s one company you can rely on to… oh, no, wait. OSX Mavericks just jumped on the bandwagon big time.

(credit)

It seems to be a rule that the earliest works of any new medium tend to go overboard with exploiting its new capabilities. Early color television shows were insanely oversaturated; early 3D movies all felt the need to throw a knife in your face; subtlety and moderation come later, after people have tired of the gimmicks.

So when a company renowned for its commitment to minimalism in design (occasionally excessively so, I argue) jumps aboard the train of needless distractions, it feels like the tech world just took a step back.

To shame just one of many offenders, have you used iTunes on OSX lately? Whereas traditionally you’d start a playlist playing in the background and get on with whatever you’re doing, the current version assumes you’d really want to be pestered each time the song changes. Hey! I know you’re doing something else, but I’m still here! Don’t forget me!

I can imagine the thinking at Cupertino:

Oh, hi! Sorry, I hadn’t noticed you there. Oh, is that what I’m listening to? Like, that is soooo cool. You’re pretty smart, huh? Cute too! Hey, some girlfriends and I are throwing this little party at my place this evening. You should totally come!

Oh, ew, it’s that creepy music player. Yeah, the one that’s always trying to tell me stuff. Like, hello, of course I know what the damn song is, I do have a pair of ears. Quick, come this way… oh, too late, I think he’s seen us.

As app developers, we can do better than this. Trying to throw ourselves in users’ faces is a very poor substitute for them wanting to peer into our world, and the more we do it, the more we come across as shallow attention-seekers.

Have confidence that a great app will be recognized as a great app, and let’s spend our time giving it a great reason to exist, rather than waste time exploiting new gimmicks to simply remind users that it does exist.