...But consequent to which last detail?

Do you like guessing games? I do. Here’s a fun one: let’s see if you can guess what this partially-obscured icon might be:

Part of a pair of scissors? A teapot? Volume control? Could be anything, huh? Let’s try another…

Care to take a stab at it? No? Too hard? OK, I’ll make life easier for you: let’s send our iPhones back in time and take a look at Thing 1 again, this time through the design language of iOS 6…

And Thing 2…

That’s better. You can actually tell what these two icons are now. Why? Because the original iOS designers had a key insight that for some reason the iOS 7 team found unpalatable: sometimes it’s the details that make an object recognizable, not the abstracted aggregate.

Let’s take a look at a real-life pair of spectacles…

Ah, do you see what I did there? That corner section, that one little detail, is the kind of shape that makes a pair of glasses look like a pair of glasses. Two connected discs with arms either side just isn’t the same: in purely topological terms, you probably won’t see such a configuration anywhere other than pairs of glasses, but I’d argue that’s not the point: the perfectly round circles of the iOS 7 reading glasses won’t indulge you with the confirmation you’d need that, yes, you are indeed looking at a pair of spectacles. Conversely, the classic shape you see in the Ray-Bans above is so distinctive that even without anything else to look at, you’d know right away that you’re looking at eyeglasses. Circles, arcs and rectangles: you’ll see those anywhere. But that shape... could only be eyeglasses.

I really think that Apple dropped the ball with the iOS 7 look. The garish gradients and lack of affordances I could drone on about some other time, but on icon design, I want to take a moment to question what the company was thinking.

Judging by appearances, it was thinking this:

Each icon should be reduced to its minimal topological form, then represented as an outline of unvarying thickness.

Why it should think that, I couldn’t comment, save to say that I think it’s misguided. Not just aesthetically misguided, but philosophically misguided. While the company has long been famed for its dedication to design purity, underlying it all, historically, had been a strong focus on customer experience. But the iOS 7 graphic design principles seem to me more focused on pursuing purity for its own sake than for end users’ benefit. Where conflicts arose between suitability and adherence to the rules, it seems to be the former that got thrown under the bus each time, regardless of how arbitrary the latter may have been.

Hence we ended up with icons that look like bifurcated love-hearts...

...that previously looked like books.

Going out on a limb here, perhaps this is the expected result of an industrial designer being given oversight of graphic design, as famously happened for iOS 7? I’m bearing in mind the famous Rams commandment that good design be consequent to the very last detail, and wondering if it could stir up an interesting conflict: what’s consequential for the usability of an object may have little overlap with what’s consequential to how the object might be recognized.

Consider the humble occlupanid for example: the puritan industrial designer would perceive the distal and proximal palps to be nothing more than vestiges of the manufacturing process and would take pains to remove them. The graphic designer, however, charged with drafting an iconic representation of the clip, may regard them as an integral part of its distinctive shape and would want to include them.

To the former, a pair of eyeglasses is a pair of lenses and a frame that connects them to a pair of arms. To the latter, the eyeglasses are a unique set of shapes that distinguishes them from anything else in the geometric lexicon of everyday objects.

iOS 7’s iconography is thus a showcase for how an industrial designer might prefer glasses and books to look, whereas previous versions capture how such objects actually look.

For an easy-to-use UI, I’d choose the latter.

Retail of the future

Walking past the storefront of a local ‘psychic’ this morning gave me an unusual business idea. What if you were to use honesty to gain an advantage in the competitive fortune-telling industry?

Sure, it sounds self-contradictory. Since time immemorial, deception has been the very foundation of the business. Anybody who claims an ability to predict events based on tarot cards, astrology, palm reading, or suchlike is an outright liar. That said, there’s a clear demand. So much so, in fact, that generations of customers have been willing to accept a placebo product in lieu of just accepting fate’s indiscriminate whimsy.

So here’s the idea: throw out the crystal ball, the tarot cards, the Ouija board. Let’s not ask for our palms to be crossed with silver: Visa or Mastercard will do nicely. Give up on the whole mystic shtick and replace the glowing neon pronouncement of “Madame W’zel: Psychic” with a new sign. A professional sign. A trustworthy sign. In the grandest, most upstanding serifs, it will read:

“Marianne Chanceweasel: Speculator”

This revolutionary new concept in retail ­­will give superior comfort to the anxious using the very finest in evidence-based statistical prognostication.

Witness the difference!

Madame W’zel, that girl I was telling you about… I’m still struggling to get her to notice me. What chance the masters of fate have destined us to be happy together?

Ah, son. Affairs of the heart can be among life’s deepest mysteries, and I can see the burden this longing is placing on your tortured, young soul. You’ve certainly come to the right place. Let’s shuffle a deck of cards and force tenuous interpretations on the draw until you’re comforted enough to ensure repeat business.

Reassured? Me neither. Let’s see if we can do better...

Ms Chanceweasel, that girl I was telling you about… I’m still struggling to get her to notice me. What chance the masters of fate have destined us to be happy together?

Well, to look at you, it’s very unlikely she hasn’t noticed you per se. Statistically I might put the odds of attraction at anywhere from twenty to thirty percent; if you wouldn’t mind stepping on the weighing scales just here, that’s great, I should be able to quote with a little more precision. I have to warn you though… in my experience, the very fact that you had to ask gives you less than a 5% hope of turning things in your favor. But, chin up, an hour a day in the gym and your odds could be well into the double-digits.

Did you see what we did there? Specificity in our predictions! Actionable advice! References to historical data! And we never once asked you to swallow any paranormal mumbo jumbo.

And that’s just for starters! At our upcoming drive-thru centers, we can assure you – for under a dollar! – that your careful choice of lottery numbers won’t improve your snowball in hell’s chance, and that your late uncle is not asking us to channel his thoughts from beyond the grave. Our network of coin-operated, fully-automated kiosks are ready to learn all about your dilemmas of career progression, and just can’t wait to tell you how you’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Meanwhile, our fortune cookies bear only the most prescient information on the dangers of overindulging in sugary, fatty, baked snacks.

As competitive advantages go, you’d have to admit… it’ll be hard for the astrologers to stay in the game.

Franchise opportunities available.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ever discovered that a word you’ve been hearing forever turns out to mean something different from what you thought?

‘Tosspot’ I always assumed was an alternative for ‘tosser’. It means ‘drunkard’.

‘Enormity’ doesn't mean ‘enormousness’. It can, but specifically regarding atrociousness, immoderation or extreme wickedness.

‘Dastardly’ can mean underhanded, wicked or cruel, but only secondarily. Its primary meaning is ‘cowardly’.

More fool me.

The Gravy Train and the Great Onion-off

Grossly simplified, here’s the process for cooking a British Indian Restaurant curry dish. Having invested heavily in pre-prep, you can follow the five steps below to serve pretty much any dish within ten minutes of it being ordered:

1. Warm some seasoned oil in a wok
2. Add whichever spices are unique to the dish
3. Add pre-cooked meat and/or vegetables
4. Add gravy
5. Reduce

The spices unique to any particular curry are relatively few; it’s the gravy that carries the body of the flavor, and it’s common to every dish. Madras, korma, Bombay aloo… you name it; apart from the rice, onion bhajis and naan bread, that gravy makes up the bulk of pretty much anything you’ll eat. Because it takes hours to make, and gets used up at around 300mL for each and every curry serving, it pays to make it in bulk. My last batch made nearly ten liters, sufficient for 26 curries, and lasted me two months.

But therein lies the problem. I’m still experimenting with how to cook each of the curry dishes, and if I’m tweaking the unique spices that make, say, a madras a madras, but doing nothing to experiment with the gravy, then the tests I’m running could be fairly inconsequential. I need to optimize the gravy, and that means cooking it in smaller batches. And with nearly 20 ingredients used in its preparation (onions, carrots, red and green peppers, cilantro (coriander), tomatoes, garlic, ginger, vegetable oil, water, salt, coriander (powder), cumin, asafetida, curry powder, fenugreek, turmeric, sugar, and sometimes more), there’s a crazy amount of variables to experiment with.

Fortunately, there’s an obvious starting point. As Voigt describes it:

“95% of the base gravy is onions. If you’re ever wondered what gives BIR curry that slightly sweet gravy – it’s onions. If you’ve ever wondered what gives the curry sauce its thickness – it’s onions. If you’ve ever wondered what gave BIR curry that taste – it’s onions.”

So, today’s first step: what kind of onions should I be using? I’m told that the choice of the UK restaurants is Dutch onions, but since they don’t seem to be available here in SF, today I’m just toying with what’s available, splitting the usual 10L batch four ways and pitting off white, yellow, sweet and red onions.

Five hours later, and I’ve got four saucepans of brown gravy. The white onion gravy perhaps has a hint of French onion soup to it; the red onion gravy has a hint of… how would you describe red onions? The yellow onion and sweet onion gravies are pretty similar, the former being (to my surprise) a slightly stronger flavor than the latter.

Bottom line: they all taste like gravy. I’ll have to do a split test when I make my next curries out of them, and perhaps next time I’ll experiment with onion sizes and cooking temperatures/times. But today I don’t feel like I’ve made any great revelations. And my apartment really smells of onions.

Ballmer’s retirement a Pyrrhic victory for Microsoft investors

Microsoft investors were jubilant today as the stock rallied (7.5% at time of writing) on the news that Steve Ballmer will be retiring within a year. I think they’re getting a little ahead of themselves: while Ballmer’s failings have been well chronicled, I think the bigger picture’s getting overlooked.

The small picture is that the man presided over a litany of strategic disasters like Windows Vista, 8, RT and Phone; the Surface surplus; the doomed Zune and Kin; and the monetary black hole that is their Online Services Division. Throw out the guy ultimately responsible, the sentiment presumably goes, and look forward to a return to the good old days.

But the bigger picture is that Steve inherited a company that literally set the agenda for the whole tech industry, and now bequeaths one that struggles to stay relevant. The forces that kept Gates’ company strong through the PC age – being able to destroy competition through existing market dominance – are the same forces that are now keeping Ballmer’s company weak in this new post-PC age, and it would be fanciful to think that a change at the helm has much hope of reversing that.

Gates’ Microsoft was a company that achieved monopoly status over a modern necessity, and wielded its power ruthlessly (even illegally) to crush competition and expand into new market segments. The MO that got them where they were went something like this: find a third party’s software product that looked to be gaining success (Lotus 123 or WordPerfect, let’s say), and throw money at a competing product (Excel or Word) until the incumbent could no longer compete. The odds were always stacked in Microsoft’s favor since the Windows tax enabled them to sustain loss-making products longer than their competitors could survive price competition. Meanwhile the Windows tax itself was protected via threats of punitive license pricing to OEMs who dared to sell non-Windows PCs.

The strategy worked enormously well for the company. While the crushing of Netscape Navigator by IE landed Microsoft in legal hot water, the eventual settlement, negotiated down from a breakup of the company to a legal slap on the wrist, emboldened the new CEO, Ballmer, to continue on the well-trodden path.

Over a decade of me-too-ism followed. Google’s success begat Bing, the PlayStation begat the Xbox, the iPod begat Zune, and so on it goes. To Ballmer’s surprise, no doubt, leveraging the Windows monopoly wasn’t enough to make these products a success. Bing never got close to Google’s market share; the Xbox, though now stable, suffered year after year of ten-digit losses; while the Zune was finally thrown away after the whole portable music player segment entered terminal decline.

Moreover, when the company’s culture is to embrace, extend and extinguish their competitors’ offerings, it’s probably inevitable that vision would be the one trait you’d expect to be absent.

In a classic case of the innovator’s dilemma, Ballmer chronically neglected to innovate in segments that could disrupt Windows’ monopoly (notably, cloud computing, smartphones and tablets). Awakened by the success of Apple and Google, it was already too late: throwing your weight around in the style of Microsoft-of-old just isn’t going to work when you’re playing catch-up.

And let’s face it, having seen how Microsoft behaves once they build a dominant platform, there’s not going to be a whole lot of goodwill towards the erstwhile tyrant of the tech industry in their struggle to conquer the mobile segment. Wounded despots don’t tend to get a whole lot of love from their subjects. They get pitchforked.

For sure, Microsoft’s best days are behind them. Steve’s squandering of their potential chances in mobile has denied them the position to ever again wield the kind of power they had when he took over. And for that I think we all owe the man our deep appreciation.

As for today’s share price spike, look at it this way: through its activity as a patent troll, Microsoft’s future revenues seem closer tied to the success of Android than to Windows Phone. If you’re looking for a recent precedent, may I suggest SCO as a case study?

Breaking the habit of a lifetime

Of everything I miss about England (friends and family excepted) good Indian food has long been at the top of the list. Back in London, it was a habit of mine to order takeout pretty much every Friday night, and save enough leftovers for ‘breakfast of the gods’ the next morning. But here in the Bay Area, the state of Indian cuisine is pretty depressing. My favorite meat dish, the chicken dhansak, is virtually impossible to come by; the onion bhaji (by far the most popular appetizer in any British Indian restaurant) I have literally never seen on a menu here; and even of the dishes that are available, that magical curry house taste just isn’t there.

It took a few years for me to act, but at the end of last year I could take it no more.

I finally kicked the habit of a lifetime – that of never, ever, ever cooking for myself – and set out on a mission to recreate the flavors I missed so badly.

First, let’s clarify that mission. What I’m trying to recreate is a style of cooking for which the usual label ‘Indian’ isn’t really suitable. The more accurate term would be ‘British Indian Restaurant’ cuisine, or ‘BIR’, a label that seems to have stuck among its fans. Not only is it clearly different from the traditional family cooking of Indian culture, it’s also increasingly not actually Indian, its recipes being shaped in large part by Pakistani and Bangladeshi influences.

In a nutshell, since the 1950s, Britain has done to curries what America did to pizza. We took a style of cuisine we liked, adapted it over decades to suit local tastes, and innovated around the theme to produce an authentic new style of cooking that stands on its own and became the new national cuisine.

As a Chicago deep-dish pizza is to ‘Italian’, so is a chicken tikka masala to ‘Indian’. The many people who tell me they’d expect the Bay Area’s curries to be pretty good on account of the migration of tech workers from India are kinda missing the point. There are sizeable Japanese populations in parts of South America, but I doubt you’d find many entertaining knife-juggling teppanyaki chefs there.

(These are terrible examples by the way. I’m really not a huge fan of Japanese-cooking-as-theater, nor, ironically, of the chicken tikka masala, but you get the point).

To my mind, once a style of cuisine has reached a critical mass of local acceptance, there’s a baseline of quality that takes root in the public consciousness (and also hegemony of spelling, though BIR isn’t quite there). A poor quality curry house in Britain simply wouldn’t last long: locals are too familiar with the baseline to stomach anything that falls below it. But here in the Bay Area – and dare I say the rest of America? – Indian food remains niche enough that a ‘common knowledge’ of baseline quality just isn’t there. And hence my absurdly ambitious goal:

I aim to cook mediocre British Indian restaurant food

…because, and please forgive my arrogance, if I can reach the level of ‘mediocre’ BIR cuisine, I’ll have exceeded the level of any of the Indian restaurants I’d be dependent on locally.

(And, once that’s achieved, I then aim to cook some truly great British Indian restaurant food. Gotta have a stretch goal).

9 months in…

Trying to solve the riddle of BIR cuisine seemed tough at first. Anyone who’s ever tried following recipes from an Indian cookery book, or bought ready-made Indian meals or sauces from supermarkets, knows that they taste absolutely nothing like restaurant food. Unlocking the secret to those magical tastes meant finding instructions from people who’ve actually worked at restaurants.

One of my earliest references was Dave Loyden’s excellent Undercover Curry, a write-up of the lessons learned by a curry fan so dedicated that he ‘quit his day job and invested three years working undercover in UK curryhouses’, as the back cover tells it. Dave’s book was an excellent starting point, but as a total newcomer to cooking I needed a lot more reference.

I discovered the work of Julian Voigt, a man who used Dave’s book as a starting point (if I understood correctly), trained himself as a curry chef and opened his own takeaway. His ebook, The Secret to that Takeaway Curry Taste (new edition due soon), is a great complement to Undercover Curry, and best of all, his YouTube videos are a great learning resource: text recipes just can’t compare to the expressive power of video demonstrations.

(A shout out also to Mick Crawford’s ‘British Indian Restaurant Style Cooking’, which had some good nuggets of useful information that the others were missing. And there’s one or two other good references too, which if you’re curious, get in touch).

So, nine months into this little endeavor, here’s where I stand:

• Pilau rice – generally good
• Chicken madras – usually bad and wildly unpredictable
• Chicken dhansak – reliably good
• Chicken korma – reliably great (I’ve really nailed this one!)
• Chicken tikka masala – bad (I think Dave Loyden’s recipe was a cruel joke. ‘Half a can of fruit cocktail’ is plausible at least, but ‘a third of a pan of ghee’ is not!). Need to try someone else’s recipe, but I was never a CTM eater in the first place, so I have little reference.
• Chicken dupiaza – once great (best dish I ever made), but I was never able to reproduce that greatness. Usually pretty good though.
• Sag aloo – reliably decent but never great
• Bombay aloo – reliably good
• Brinjal bhaji – usually good but somewhat unpredictable
• Mushroom bhaji – always at least decent
• Onion bhaji – sometimes great, sometimes poor. Usually good, but I make too many that just crumble apart, and I’m still learning how to fry them just right.

One thing I really need to work on is my pre-cooked chicken. One of the things BIR restaurants really get right is the marinade (while restaurants here in the Bay Area seem to not bother at all) so I’ve been paying particular attention, but I just can’t get the flavor right. My texture’s a little off too: aiming for juicy and tender, but too often achieving rubbery and powdery.

The beginnings of a base gravy. A pot full of onions, with a few other veg sprinkled on top.

The base gravy having stewed for a couple of hours, having been blended, diluted, and with the spices added. In another hour or two this'll be the common foundation to pretty much any curry dish. There's enough here for nearly 30 portions; it helps to make it all in one go.

Bombay aloo

Brinjal bhaji

Chicken dhansak