Neven Mrgan’s Tumbl
Missing vowels since before it was cool.

Searching in iOS apps typically works one of two ways: you either have a dedicated Search tab, or the table view in some other tab includes a search field at the top. In both cases, the field is at the top for a good reason: as you start typing, it’s useful to see search suggestions or quick results in a list below.

Not every app is made up of stock table-views and tab bars. Getting a bit more custom with the UI is cool. However, breaking user expectations isn’t. Here’s what I mean. On the left is the first view in the super-handy Amazon Mobile app.

On the right is the view you get when you tap the search field in the first view. Trippy, huh? The starting view promises that it includes a search field, and that when you tap it you will begin to type in it. But it’s all an illusion; that’s not a search field at all. It’s an active area which, when tapped, displays another, differently laid-out view. It’s a button.

Here’s another example. While it’s not technically a search field, it sure tries to look like one, and it suffers from the same problem as Amazon’s app. On the left, the welcome screen of the Goodreads app.

On the right, the view you get when you tap “What page are you on?” It’s unrelated in pretty much every imaginable way: different position, background, field shape, font, width…

Both of these “work”. The camouflaged buttons perform as buttons, and the user will indeed end up doing what they set out to do. But they will be confused in the process, because they expect fields to function as fields: you tap them and type into them, there and then.

How can this be fixed? In Amazon’s case, the search field should be a real search field, glued to the top of the view. The Amazon logo is redundant and not useful; the “Welcome.” text is almost charmingly dull. This solution assumes Amazon wants to keep the search field in this first view at all; it already has a dedicated tab. Goodreads should redesign the page-number control completely. It’s a unique case and it should be styled and engineered uniquely. Integrate the actual functionality of the second, dark view into the first screen, showing the note area below after you tap? This is an opportunity to create an exciting new design.

It would be hard to argue that either of these designs is a marvel of usability today. They should be changed not because Apple says or does so, but because they miscommunicate their intent and interaction.

My platonic/intellectual love affair with Alan Moore began on my first visit to Buzz’s LES apartment. Scanning his bookshelf - as I am wont to do, as I will do with your shelves when I visit your home - I noticed a number of personal favorites. Knowing already that Buzz was a man whose tastes I trusted, I then noted that he had a nice run of Alan Moore’s graphic novels squeezed in next to a MST3K book. Recalling that another tastemaking friend of mine was also a Mooreophilliac, I figured I had to go for it.

And when I mentioned Alan Moore’s upcoming novel to Buzz recently - Jerusalem, a second epic set entirely in Northampton - it was no surprise that he promptly pulled out a classical reference Moore himself must have had in mind:

JERUSALEM (from Milton)

by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

Somehow, mrgan.tumblr.com has become de facto my only web home. I feel weird about this fact from a theoretical perspective, but in practice, it seems to work.

This blog had 679,521 page views in 2011. Browser-wise, 38% of my visitor used Safari, 27% used Chrome, and 18% Firefox. Nearly a third were on Windows, which frankly shocks me.

Here are my most popular posts for the year:

1. Pixelfari. I feel guilty since I didn’t actually develop this; some day, the full tale can be told.
2. All the sizes of iOS app icons
3. Pie Guy (posted in 2009!)
4. Labeling the Back button
5. Hand-pixelated
6. Steve
7. iOS on the desktop

It’s good to see that most of these are good old black-on-white text, not just funny pics.

I’ll be honest: 2011 was not the best year in music for me. I typically listen to albums more than five years old, but even so, I don’t remember ever buying so little new music. That said, here’s a top-4 list of what I bought and liked last year.

4. Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two

It’s not the greatest album in the world, and it’s not close to the greatest Beastie Boys album. But it’s better than a lot of their output in the last ten years, and it’s fun. That’ll do for 2011.

3. Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory, Songs to Test By

I’m not sure this soundtrack will make much sense to you if you haven’t played the game; it’s a 3-disc set filled with lots of background noises and moody tones. Not exactly driving music, but it’ll put you in the game’s mood. If you remember how awesome that was, you’ll enjoy the listening experience. Also, it’s somehow free.

2. The Lonely Island, Turtleneck & Chain

Continuing my sighing, I’ll note that their previous album, Incredibad, is slightly better. But this one’s pretty good too - from the stakes-raising opener ‘We’re Back’ to the ante-upping sequel ‘Motherlover’, it brings on more of everything. Funny in all the right and wrong ways.

1. Shabazz Palaces, Black Up

An unlikely favorite, this bizarre electronic hip-hop album wins by the sheer force of its weirdness. Big, broken beats, head-scratching lyrics, aggressively unorthodox song structures. Somehow, none of that is off-putting. It flows in its own strange way, stripped down enough that you can put it on in the background and just occasionally WTF at the Tom Waitsy touches.

We may live in a world of 99c singles, but I’m still an old album-dinosaur. I bought very few single songs released in 2011, so they’re not even worth mentioning. Sorry to be such a downer. Music is awesome.

This is my second year of consistent book-tracking using Goodreads. Anything that has an ISBN gets added to Goodreads when I place it on my to-read shelf.

The best book I read in 2011 was Clay Christensen’s 1997 classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s a humble and powerful book. I also enjoyed, to the extent that this is possible with his books, Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19. I found Alan Moore’s Halo Jones extremely charming once I got used to the oh-so-80s art. I rediscovered Elmore Leonard, this time in the form of his fun western stories. I finished the 28-volume epic Lone Wolf and Cub (I loved it), then picked up Oishinbo, a wonderfully instructive cooking manga.

While quantity is not the point in book-reading (but it helps find quality) this is a data-centric post, so here are the longest books I read last year:

• A Moment in The Sun, John Sayles (955 pages) ★★★★☆
• The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker (848 pages) ★★★★☆
• Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner (702 pages) ★★★★☆
• Freedomland, Richard Price (672 pages) ★★★★☆
• Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson (630 pages) ★★★☆☆

Goodreads added some new stats tools this year, so I’m able to report the following as well:

Many of the comics I read this year came from your recommendations. Thank you from the bottom of my bookshelf! Please feel free to browse around my Goodreads profile to get a sense of what I like, then let me know on twitter what I should read next.

I’m still a fan of the Withings Wifi scale. By simply stepping on and off a very attractive piece of glass in our bedroom every morning, I can check my weight stats on my computer or phone. Nothing to manually enter, nothing to manage.

Here’s the graph of my weight over the course of 2011. Note that I’m 6’2”, with sedentary physical activity, BMI of 21.8.

A wash, overall - I mostly stayed within the ~2 lb margin of error. I didn’t get close to my totally arbitrary goal of 165 lb. While I felt like a deep-fried donut over the winter holidays, I actually ended up seemingly losing 2 lb during that period.

The scale attempts to measure my body fat percentage as well, but this is generally considered unreliable. My figure hovered around 10%.

If you’re interested in owning a well-made, pretty, and Internet-connected 21st-century scale, here’s an Amazon affiliate link. Godspeed.

1. Olive Mrgan

Ten months old now, she’s a stellar baby. Her current repertoire includes lightning-speed crawling, confident assisted walking, occasional freestanding, eating small bits of fruit and cheese, iPad use, the early stages of dancing and clapping, and the syllables “na”, “da”, “ba”, and “la”, infinitely repeated. In a year of somewhat rough seas for the economy, politics, art, and culture, it was good to have a cute little human to anchor me.

2. Horse_ebooks

This year, one brave and hard-working comedian captured the zeitgeist like no other. He delivered a reliable stream of slice-of-life observations and character work, all monetized not in your usual movies or TV, but with an interesting web-based, crowdsourced scheme. No, not Louis CK - I’m talking about Horse_ebooks.

He’s likely a Russian spambot, grabbing random chunks of text from online ebooks and scammy websites, peppering this stream of nonsense with ad links. As far as the horse is concerned, those ads are the real meat here; the rest is padding meant to throw off any automated spam detectors. But to the rest of us, these garbled fragments, from extreme proclamations found only in self-help writing to cut-off sentences, from poorly parsed PDFs to self-aware tweets - to us humans, this is all brilliant comedy… Delivered by a beautiful, automated horse. Who’s into ebooks.

Next time he tweets something, paste the whole line into google. It’ll lead to some goofy ebook, confirming that no human is currently writing these with the intent of making them funny. But even if Horse_ebooks gets hijacked by his human creator, or if he is otherwise ruined, we’ll always have the memories. The horse has earned his stripes, and for my money, he can decide at any point to ride himself off into the sunset.

3. Horace Dediu

Horace is an industry analyst with a fondness for Apple’s greatness, an eye for charts, and an education in Clay Christensen’s disruptive theory. He’s a rare voice of reason in the area of Apple-tea-leaf-reading, and an educator by nature. He makes the theory of business - a dry subject by any standard - exciting and instructive. I will gladly follow, buy, or attend any Dediu-related outlet, product, or event. If there were a way to one-click-subscribe to someone’s entire creative output, I’d subscribe to Horace’s. Catch him on his blog Asymco, or his podcast The Critical Path.

4. Portal 2

I have no idea why I resisted Cabel’s insistence that I would love the heck out of Portal if I just gave it a shot. The truth is, I just don’t play many long-form games, and definitely not many FPS’s. See my problem here? Portal and Portal 2 are definitely not FPS’s. They’re clever, patient, beautifully written room puzzles. Every single aspect of the design is effortlessly impressive. Portal 2 is the best movie of 2011.

5. Nau

Earlier this year, I looked in my closet and realized that I hated most of my clothes. A drastic change was in order. While I couldn’t pull off a Jobsian single-outfit uniform, I figured that focusing on one good brand could work. It would reduce my frustration with choosing what to buy, and it would align my wardrobe with a good brand’s direction.

The brand I picked was Nau. They’re a Portland-based shop designing urban and outdoor apparel. I’ve been extremely happy with most of my purchases. I hope to continue to buy fewer, better clothes.

6. Chili pan mee

Out of nowhere, this Malaysian dish became my favorite food ever. Ok, not quite out of nowhere: it came from issue #1 of Lucky Peach, a fantastic food magazine started by David Chang of Momofuku fame. I’ve made several tweaked versions of his recipe for this mix of ragù, chili-shallot sauce, fried anchovies, and soft egg served over noodles, and they were all great: from the superspicy bowl to the tomato-rich one, from Thai chiles to Mexican ones.

I hope you also found some new favorites last year. Let’s find more in 2012, and let’s work on making things that become other people’s favorites!

iOS 5 introduced iMessage, a service that seeks to replace text messaging. Carriers view text messaging as a special, astronomically priced type of data - iMessage undoes this madness and uses your dumb data pipe to send text, pictures, and videos to users identified by their email or phone number. It cleverly falls back to text messaging if the recipient isn’t on iOS 5.

Since most of my friends are iPhone nerds, I wondered what the introduction of iMessage would do for my text-message usage. Here’s some early data:

Three months into iOS 5, I’m using a trivial quantity of text messages. I currently pay $10/month for up to 1000 messages. Assuming these bill at 20c/message (it varies depending on your plan, I’m told) I could cancel my messaging plan and end up paying less overall, even at that outrageous price. I’ll wait another two months to confirm this massive drop - then it’s time to get all Cancellor Valorum on AT&T’s ass.

(Bonus clarification: the service is called iMessage. The app is still called Messages. And the thing you send with it? It’s just a “message”. The way Apple words it (“iMessage is built into Messages”) sounds like they might bring iMessage to other apps. From their marketing copy to god’s ears.)

Update: adjusted the image to fix the iOS 5 launch date.

Dan Benjamin on Back to Work:

“I don’t believe it’s possible to have a side business. I don’t think you can have a business on the side. I don’t think you can go to work and have a job and then come home and run a business. I believe that both the job and the side business… you will never reach your potential in either of them, *and* it will affect your personal life as well. Now, it might be possible to have a business and run a business and by some measure say it’s successful and that you’re making some money. But I don’t believe that it’ll ever reach its potential, you’ll never reach your potential in the things that you do if you’re that divided.”

 (via incorrigiblerobot)

This appears to say the exact opposite of what my speech at re:build 2011 got at; I argued that meaningful side-interests and projects were a great thing. However, I agree with Dan on this: you will never reach your full potential in thing A or B if you do them both instead of focusing on one. But I think that’s totally cool; partially realized potential is nothing to sneeze at. I’m a proponent of what might be called focused dabbling.

Consider music, as a performing art. For the vast majority of people in the world this is a hobby. A very tiny minority focus on it to the extent that it becomes their primary occupation. It would in fact be rather questionable advice to suggest that everyone who bangs at a keyboard or plucks at strings in their bedroom should go full bore on it, shooting for Carnegie Hall or bust. A hobby-level interest brings joy to a huge number of people in the world (where by interest I mean affinity, time, and effort).

It’s not just that playing music is an enjoyable activity, either. Smart, challenging hobbies tends to affect your thinking on all matters. Even a completely passive, spectator-level interest in sports, with absolutely no desire to get out there and swing the bat or toss the ball yourself, develops your thinking on strategy and drama. A baseball fan doesn’t just see everything as a baseball metaphor; they see things others don’t see because they are a baseball metaphor.

Dan talked about two businesses, specifically; I’m expanding this to a more general discussion of things that occupy your time. What makes a hobby a business is whether you can make money with it, and we all probably agree that it would be great if we could make money with our pastimes. Focusing specifically on the money-making aspect is a recipe for headache, but a smart person who already makes money at their “day job” has a lot of low-stress options for making money with a hobby these days. Will it be enough money to cover the recording of that album, the writing of that book, the making of that app? Maybe not. But with hobbies, you have to count the pleasure you derive from the effort as income; substantial income, too, otherwise you’d be better off with another hobby.

The hardest thing for humans to persuade each other of is priorities. Should you be an exercise freak? A computer wiz? A classical-literature buff? A badass hiker? A game maker? A dedicated volunteer? A great cook? These are all worthy activities, each enriching your life and likely the lives of others. Our pasts lead us to a mix of a few obsessions, and hopefully we keep our minds open to many more. Those of us who commit to honing that one art may index excel at it. But for my doomed attempt at convincing you of how to arrange your life, I suggest a solid interest in, oh, three or five Big Things. They will compete for your attention, and the vagaries of fate will lead you toward one, then another. Things you learn in the first will improve you in the second, then bring you to a whole new third. You will be a happier and better person for branching out a bit.

Crime is fascinating, and murder is the most fascinating crime. Every night, millions of Americans watch fictionalized accounts of the most violent act of all, followed by fictionalized attempts to discover, solve, and punish it. Here are some raw numbers to go with our intuitions and popular depictions. (Figures not specified as percentages are per 100,000 people.)

• In 2005, the homicide rate in the US was 5.6.
• In 2011, it was 4.8. It has been steadily declining since 1991.
• In 2010, the international homicide rate was 6.9. For Europe, 3.5.
• In 2008, there were 883,600 law enforcement officers in the US. In 2010, 56 law enforcement officers were killed. Using the first figure, this is a murder rate of 6.34.
• In 2004, the national clearance rate for murder cases was 64.8%.
• In 2008, this clearance rate was 94% in San Diego, and 22% in New Orleans.
• In 2005, the suicide rate in the US was 11.0. The person likeliest to kill you is you.