Scrolling in Lion

Fair warning: this will be a Mac-centric geeky entry and I will not be explaining the terminology or context.

Apple decided to incorporate certain iOS-isms into Mac OS X. I guess somebody in the user experience group decided this was the direction OS X had to take, and as I know from painful experience that I have almost zero expertise in user interface design, I'll defer to those who allegedly know.

That said, somebody needs to drag the iTunes and AppKit teams into a conference room and bang heads together until they get the actual user experience right. (It wouldn't hurt to have the Safari team in there, too.)

The problem is that by doing away with AppKit's former scrolling behavior, Apple has made it much more difficult to navigate within windows that have embedded, scrolling subviews. Imagine gesturing on a MacBook's trackpad to scroll down an iTunes artist page in which there are scrolling views for songs, videos and movies. You want to get to the "movies" section, which isn't visible on the screen. However, the cursor enters the "music" section and you're suddenly scrolling within that instead of the surrounding view.

You sigh, then look for the scrollbar that shows up at the far side of the surrounding view as you scroll through it. Then you realize that the scrollbar goes away when the scrolling movement stops. You move the cursor over where the scrollbar shows up, but just hovering the cursor over that area doesn't make the bar show up: only scrolling will do that.

The arrow keys work, but only for the outermost view. They might work on the inner views too, but I haven't tried that, and before that could work you'd need to get focus into whichever inner view you want to manipulate. I don't know how to do that without selecting something in the inner view, which is not what I want to do.

I use hardly any iOS apps so I don't know how many include embedded scrolling subviews, but I haven't experienced the problem I just described in Lion. Part of the problem, I just realized, is that iTunes in OS X allows its window to consist of nothing but embedded subviews: there's no requirement that the outermost view be accessible at all times via, for example, an outermost strip just inside the enclosing window. That means there's no place to put the cursor within the iTunes window boundary to indicate "my gestures apply to the outermost view". (Or if there is such a place, it's not obvious.)

The pre-Lion AppKit, and before it AppKit in NeXTStep, had a solidly-designed set of user interface elements and behaviors. Other versions of OS X tweaked the visual appearance of the elements and sometimes the default layouts (e.g., the location of the scrolling arrows), but these changes didn't disturb the logic of the fundamental behaviors. With Lion, AppKit has stepped into quicksand because the user experience metaphors and hardware/software environment of iOS don't completely match those of OS X.

I hope the user experience and AppKit teams are already thinking long and hard about those user experience metaphors in OS X. It's long past time for an overhauled human interface guidelines document (which Apple issued early in the life of OS X and proceeded to violate whenever the guidelines were inconvenient, but never mind that). The upgraded document would be valuable in itself, but the thinking behind it — the thinking needed to arrive at a consistent model of user interaction and a coherent set of user experience metaphors — is what is really crucial.

The forgotten man in the ACA ruling

One reason a lot of people thought the Supreme Court would strike down the Affordable Care Act was the grilling that Obama's Solicitor General took at the Justices' hands during oral arguments. Some of us — certainly including me — had forgotten about those oral arguments, which garnered Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. harsh and often snide criticism in the media for what those critics considered an awkward and fumbling performance.

The New York Times has a brief reminder article about Verrilli today.

I can't resist spoiling perhaps the best part of the piece.

“Let me just say on that point that people who say there’s no such thing as bad publicity have no idea what they’re talking about,” he said. “There is definitely bad publicity. Being on the wrong end of a Jon Stewart monologue is bad publicity.”

SCOTUS and the Affordable Care Act

There's lots of coverage about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today that upholds most of President Obama's signature health care reform legislation, the Affordable Care Act. I'm therefore not going to link to any specific article; if you haven't already read or watched anything about it, do a Web search.

My only thought on the subject is, I'm wondering how President Obama and the Democrats generally will fumble the (unfortunately) important battle over the public perception of the Court's decision and of the Act itself. Because if recent history is any indication, they will screw up and lose that battle to the Republicans, even if the Dems have the facts on their side. Republicans in the last twenty years have excelled at repeating The Big Lie (which varies according to which issue they're pushing) often enough that people who aren't paying attention start believing it ("Saddam Hussein is linked to the 9/11 terrorists", for example).

A worrying and potentially more significant byproduct of today's decision is discussed in a blog post in the New York Times, namely, the potential gutting of the Commerce Clause. We may end up regretting this decision as much as we regret Citizens United in the not too distant future.

Oh, and with this Constitutional Twister of a decision (by which I mean it bends first one way, then another; you should see the disparate alliances he cobbled together in different parts of the decision to muster a bare majority for the whole), Chief Justice Roberts looks like he excels at playing the public-relations game. He has, at first blush, apparently improved the Court's battered reputation, about which he is known to care a good deal. Whether he is worth respecting for his judicial principles and dedication to a genuinely nonpartisan reading of the law and the Constitution is, in my opinion, still gravely in doubt. I suspect, though, that a few decades hence, he and this era's Court will not be as well-regarded as he would like.

Goodman on Ann Curry

If there's a silver lining to the strange brouhaha surrounding Ann Curry's tenure on the Today show, leading up to her ouster as its cohost, it's that the fuss has resulted in what looks like a future classic Tim Goodman column for The Hollywood Reporter.

Can’t this network do anything right? We’re a long way past “this is starting to get embarrassing” and nudging up against “this is starting to get pathological.”

Goodman reminds us again of NBC's fascinatingly and hilariously awful mishandling of the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien-Tonight Show succession. You would think one reputation-damaging, talent-related fiasco a decade would be enough, but no, the network can't seem to get enough.

All those years of Couric’s sincerity, which seemed so false to some (ahem), might have trained morning show viewers to want a certain someone. And perhaps Curry is not that person.

But is NBC absolutely sure that Savannah Guthrie is that person? I’m willing to bet that NBC has no idea whether Guthrie is the new It Host. Whoever made this decision probably got tired of having the bean counters in their office saying: “We’re hemorrhaging money, and we think it’s Curry. You’ve got to do something.”

I don't watch the networks' nauseatingly chipper morning products so I don't know or care whether Curry was any good in her role. I'm just grateful her travails gave Goodman an excuse to unleash the snark on the hapless NBC.

If we can't have Captain Kirk ...

In the category of "I don't know if this is good news or bad news for Obama" is a survey that finds more Americans think President Obama would be better able to handle an alien invasion than Mitt Romney.

No, really: I read this in a Los Angeles Times story.

And the survey didn't stop there.

It even asked which superhero Americans would turn to first in the event of an alien invasion. (It's the Hulk.)

I happen to believe that there must be extraterrestrial life, and very likely intelligent extraterrestrial life (the universe is just too big for Earth to be the only place harboring life of any kind), but I don't believe in the Hulk, so ... I'm not sure where this survey leaves me.

Denying science in North Carolina

Politicians in North Carolina are trying to legislate not merely in ignorance of science, but in defiance of it. According to a Los Angeles Times article:

The result is House Bill 819, a measure that would require sea level forecasts to be based on past patterns and would all but outlaw projections based on climate change data.

The bill is the result of a state commission's prediction of a disturbing 39-inch rise in sea level by 2100. "[C]oastal business and development leaders" were concerned that this prediction would cost them and current homeowners millions, so they pressured legislators to do something about it.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Perhaps the developers have genuine concerns about the quality of the research conducted by the commission.

[Tom] Thompson, director of the Beaufort County Economic Development Commission, called the 39-inch prediction "dishonest statistically" and no better than a coin flip. In an interview, he dismissed climate change as "a phobia" pushed by environmentalists.

John Droz Jr., NC-20's science advisor, said commission scientists were "bent on promoting their personal political agenda." NC-20's projections "are entirely about the science" and have nothing to do with developers, or economics, Droz wrote in a letter to the News & Observer newspaper.

Let's see: Thompson, who does not appear to have scientific training, dismisses climate change outright, while Droz, who presumably has some kind of scientific training if he's a "science advisor", impugns the motivations of scientists with whom he disagrees (or perhaps is paid to disagree). One completely dismisses a scientific finding with plenty of evidence behind it, the other disingenuously attacks the character of the messengers. There's a pair you can rely on.

Perhaps they don't trust the commission's scientists because they know how untrustworthy they themselves are.

Or maybe they just have a lot of money on the line.

The politicians, of course, are all about the money, and I'm sure the business community has thrown plenty of it to push Bill 819.

If I lived in North Carolina, I'd be plenty sore that some of my elected representatives were behaving like jackasses, ignoring the best scientific recommendations available in favor of avowedly biased, financially motivated, antiscientific claptrap.

The great pity is, none of those elected representatives will be alive to see how wrong they were about climate change, and how devastating the consequences are for future generations. It's also a great pity that those of you who keep electing these venal, ass-ignorant politicos won't be alive to see how badly your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren fare in the damaged world you leave them in your own ignorance and willful blindness.

Aaron Sorkin being glib

I didn't think I'd be linking to a Hollywood Reporter story that wasn't written by Tim Goodman, but I had to comment on this remark by writer/producer Aaron Sorkin:

I think it [the United States] is the greatest country in the world, and a lot of it has to do with what Emily Mortimer's character said: "We are a country that keeps saying that we can do better." It's also a country where I'm allowed to write a show like this. I'm glad we're that. I'm two generations removed from being blacklisted in Hollywood, I surely would have been one of those guys called in front of the committee, and we're not that country anymore.

[emphasis added]

Really, Mr. Sorkin? Really?

You know what the surest sign is that a country is susceptible to the authoritarian thinking that Joseph McCarthy exemplified?

Denying that it's possible.

Don't ever think your neighbors — or you — are immune to the kind of hypernationalism, jingoism, paranoia, and blame-mongering that the U.S. displayed so disgracefully in the 1950s. Hell, we demonstrated these same terrible traits again in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — and some, especially the more despicable commentators and politicians who style themselves as "conservatives", continue to indulge their basest instincts along the same lines. (Some of the latter may just see dollar signs and not be true believers themselves, but they're just as despicable.)

The ugly truth is, we are still that country.

That doesn't mean there's something uniquely broken about the United States. The U.S. is no worse than most other countries in that respect.

The ugliness that McCarthy so enthusiastically spewed, and encouraged so many others to spew in their turn, is deeply embedded in human nature. To deny that is to leave yourself open to falling victim to it. That's why these dark impulses have resurfaced again and again: in the Sudan, in Rwanda, in the former Yugoslavia, in India, and perhaps most tragically and unforgettably, in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

I've never watched any of Sorkin's TV shows or movies. I only hope they're not as glib as he was in this interview.