Always The Critic

Terrible Siemens fridge controls

The problem with a lot of industrial design is that it's cynically conducted to sell the device in the first place, rather than to actually be any good in the long run. That is to say, the device is designed to appeal to the shop-floor browser who's making a snap judgement between competing products, rather than to actually be a brilliant product for them to use year after year. Once they've bought it the game is over as far as the manufacturer is concerned, as long as it doesn't actually break down, because poor usability does not invoke the warranty! I came across a great example of this recently in the control panel of a Siemens fridge. Behold:

There is one button on here that you will use several times a day. The rest you may use either never or once every year or two. Care to hazard a guess which one is the magic button of actual usefulness? It's the one marked "dispenser". Or to be precise it's the one marked "dis-penser" split over two lines, such is their lack of grace. This button switches the ice/water dispenser between water, ice and crushed ice. To get a glass of iced water, you have to press it a few times to cycle round the options as you fill your glass with ice, then water.

This should be the only button on the front of the fridge immediately above the dispenser, and it should be very clearly labelled. In fact arguably there should be three buttons, for water, ice and crushed ice, with LEDs to show which one is selected. They should be labelled "Cold water", "Ice" and "Crushed Ice". Imagine a visitor to your house approaching your Siemens fridge for a cool drink. They will probably accidentally defrost your freezer then child-lock the fridge before giving up and having tap water. Maybe it's an eco feature?

The controls that are not related to the water/ice dispenser should be far away from it, possibly inside the fridge door or behind a panel, so as not to pointlessly engender confusion and accidental fridge reconfiguration when trying to get a refreshing beverage.

So why have Siemens chosen to take this insane path? I don't believe they could be so obviously dumb, so I assume it's a cynical ploy to sell more fridges. Imagine Joe Shopper, strolling through the aisles of Currys, looking at endless gleaming monoliths of cool technology. Joe wants a high-end fridge, the sort of fridge that says "Joe is a classy guy who won't let anything stand between him and a glass of brain-freezingly cold water." Given two stainless steel slabs of Germanic engineering with largely identical specs he's going to go for the one with the most 'impressive' control panel. So actually Joe, it's your fault, but the nice guys in the Siemens design department must cry themselves to sleep at night.

Kitchen shelves

Our kitchen had one patch of bare wall but nowhere to put cookbooks other than in a pile on a worktop. A perfect opportunity for some bookshelves! I planned a custom construction made from pine, comprising two uprights resting on the floor with four cross pieces (for three shelves and a top) with the whole thing screwed to the wall for rock solidness.

I originally expected to use 18mm thick sawn pine timber, but in B&Q it was clear that these were actually quite warped end to end - the top of a 2.4m plank was about 30 degrees twisted compared to the bottom so that it would have messed up the result something chronic. Instead I bought pine "furniture board" which is engineered from multiple pieces of pine glued together (edge to edge, not ply) which gives a much less lively result with hardly any warp whilst looking quite attractive. It's quite a lot more expensive mind you, and having waited 30 minutes for the timber cutting service to re-open after lunch I was told my 20cm wide boards were not suitable for the machine. At 2.4m long they weren't going to fit in the car so a hasty re-planning was required, resulting in the purchase of a number of smaller 25cm wide pre-cut pieces. I'm glad I went for that width actually as many of the books are 22cm and there's room to accommodate that depth from the wall even though I was worried there wouldn't be.

I had been keen to get all the lengths cut in store for a perfectly square, straight cut with identical lengths for all the shelves. I don't have a table saw so I was going to struggle to do this easily myself, but I was forced to saw the boards down to the right length with a hand saw. It was tough to get a good result here and to get them all the exact same length, but the flex in the uprights accommodated the differences. I simply put two number 8 screws into the end of each shelf to hold it in place, with carefully drilled countersunk screw holes, and that seems to have done the job. The countersink bit I bought recently is a godsend - it really makes the results look so much more professional.

A couple of simple metal angle brackets off the peg from B&Q allowed me to screw the whole ensemble firmly to the wall and it really is very rigid. Also note in the picture (click for bigger version) the 45 degree cut off on the tops of the side pieces and the cut-outs at the bottom to allow it to sit flush against the wall above the skirting.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with the result apart from one thing. I slightly lost track of of the height of my biggest books between start and end of the project, the result being that they don't quite fit on the shelves by a few millimetres. I'm kicking myself about this, but I'm a novice and I'll learn from these mistakes.

Fridge Temperature Control

The temperature controls in most fridges really get my design goat. Are they a thermostatic  'temperature' control or a 'power' control? They're not giving anything away! If I want my fridge to be colder should I turn up the control to 5 for maximum cooling power, or turn it down to 1 as in 1 degree centigrade? Labelling it 1 to 5 is just begging for confusion. If it's truly a thermostat (and well enough calibrated) then make it clear with 'c' markings. If it's a power control then make that clear with "cooler" / "warmer", red / blue gradients or something. Perhaps I need to buy more expensive fridges with digital thermostatic controls.

Snow Leopard Arrives

Precisely one week after it was launched, my copy of Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" landed on my desk at work. Apple claim to have posted it last Friday, but the bank holiday weekend and postal strikes have conspired to keep me waiting this long.

On my recent Mac Pro it installed in 28 minutes and recovered a startling 31GB of disk space. I'm not quite sure how it managed that to be honest, as it's a lot more than most others are reporting. [Update: actually I suspect it's because Apple have changed the definition of a GB for Snow Leopard, so my comparisons of space used before and after are not comparing like for like. Now 1GB = 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas previously it was 2^10 * 2^10 * 2^10 = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.]

That same Mac Pro is also capable of booting into the 64 bit kernel by holding down '6' and '4' during boot. You can check it's worked in System Profiler, where on the Software page it should say  "64-bit Kernel and Extensions: Yes". I've not noticed any abnormalities and supposedly it might run a bit faster this way, so if it stays good then I'll probably set it to 64 bit kernel permanently.

Note that only XServe machines boot with the 64 bit kernel by default, and many 64 bit Macs (like older Core 2 Duo MacBooks) can't do so because they lack 64 bit EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface).

In general I like Snow Leopard - it's the same as Leopard but all round snappier and a bit nicer. Some changes confuse me though. Take the new arbitrarily styled menus for dock items, as shown below. Nothing else in the system looks the same, and that's probably a good thing because it's hard to read, with the section heads and tick marks being far too low contrast. They're almost invisible! A real UI own goal if you ask me. Maybe they designed it before they set the gamma to 2.2...

BarclayCard Website Improvements

I was pleasantly surprised when I went to pay my most recent credit card bill. Not only was it relatively small for a change, but the BarclayCard website has been revamped, with that most unusual of results: a markedly better user experience!

They now show a coloured bar meter indicating your total credit limit (the whole length of the bar) with your last statement and current total outstanding clearly marked as coloured portions of it. It's a really great way to graphically show the balance. They've clearly paid attention to every aspect of user interaction, with the flow being very straightforward and very clearly guided at all times, but not onerous.

Perhaps the very best change is the return of the option to pay off your last statement in full. For the last year or so they had things set up so the options when paying were: minimum amount, whole balance (including new transactions since last statement) or custom amount. To pay off your last statement in full you had to manually read off the amount and type it into the custom field. This was very cheeky of them, clearly trying to steer the punters into taking less advantage of the free credit grace period (by paying more than their last statement amount) or paying less than their last statement amount and so accruing expensive interest. I'm glad to see this cynical move has been reversed.

Siemens Dishwasher Door

When is a Dishwasher door not a dishwasher door? When it's a jar.

That's a joke by the way. It's especially a joke if you have a Siemens dishwasher who's door is not designed to be left ajar. You can have it fully open, or fully closed, but it won't rest in any position in-between unless you prop it open, e.g. with a cork or other handy item that you may have to hand, as per my picture below.

Why would I want to prop it open? Because after it's finished, if you open the door for 15 minutes then the residual heat dries the contents just nicely, as long as the steam can escape. If you don't open the door, you can look forward to plates and glasses that still need the attention of a tea towel, even several hours after the machine finishes its cycle. Leaving the door fully open is asking for a kitchen accident of course, so that's not really an option. This door ajar approach is standard practice with any dishwasher, no? Maybe I'm alone in this, but every other dishwasher I've come across neatly sits open a few inches to facilitate my whim, and it's got to be trivially easy to manufacture into the door mechanism. Certainly my posh Siemens dishwasher would look a lot better without the cork.

Daylight Saving Design - Ora ilLegale clock

I saw this and smiled. What a delightfully simple design for a clock with easy daylight savings adjustment. Only one downside - accidentally knock it without realising, or more likely have a mischievous friend knock it deliberately - and you'll be an hour out. So I'd be tempted to add "Summer" and "Winter" or some neat icons along the flat edges to make it obvious what setting it's currently on. That also solves the problem of knowing what position it's supposed to start off in when you get it.

MacBooks - the no-button trackpad

The theory is good with the new buttonless MacBook trackpads, but in practice I think it's flawed. The whole very large surface clicks down when pushed, though it's hinged at the far side, so it works best at the side closest to the user. So you ought to be able to use your thumb to click exactly where the button used to be, and be no worse off than before. Problem is, the button was raised up a bit above the palmrest, whereas the tracking surface is a shade below it. So now your thumb has to reach down and over the lip to click, which is a bit uncomfortable. It's a subtle difference but I think an important one.

I've only had a play in the shop, so maybe I'd get used to it and maybe even change my clicking habits entirely, but it put me right off.

HTML Colour Codes from Mac OS X Colour Picker

I do quite a lot of futzing around developing web apps, and as a result I'm often needing to choose colours to use in them, and I want those colours in HTML hex form - e.g. #ff0000 (bright red). The standard Mac OS X colour picker is a pretty reasonable colour picker, with all the features I want: colour wheel, RGB sliders, HSB sliders etc. but it lacks the most crucial feature - easy output of HTML hex codes! This is clearly a criminal omission, and it meant I'd frequently have to convert from RGB 0-255 numbers down to hex, which is tedious in the extreme.

Hence I was muchly pleased when I found Hex Colour Picker, which adds exactly this missing feature to the standard Mac colour picker panel. Perfect. Now I just open TextEdit, hit cmd-shift-c to bring up the colour panel and I have everything I need for web colour picking.

Lifts: Britain vs The Rest of the World

Britain loses, which is why I'd rather take the stairs.

Britain

In this country all lifts are programmed to sap the living souls of their occupants. You get into the lift and then wait an eternity, jabbing at the buttons in the forlorn hope that they might be connected to something. Eventually it realises it's a lift rather than a walk-in wardrobe and shuts the doors. Your captor now waits a while, pondering the endless infinity of space. Some time later, maybe a week, maybe a month, the slow voyage begins. I hope you brought a packed lunch, we're going three floors here! Just us your pension matures you arrive a few tens of feet higher than you started when you were a sprightly young thing. But let us rest a while, there's no hurry! Why open the doors immediately when there are so many fun things to do in the lift? The grim reaper circles as the sands of time run out and finally the lift lets you go back out into the world. Then it sits there with its mouth open, like the 'special' kid at school, if only you could remember that far back.

The Rest of the World

Press button in lobby - the doors open a fraction of a second before you thought you touched the button. Step inside and the doors close, patting you on the bottom as you enter. In the time it takes you to turn around, you've arrived at your destination floor, simply by thinking about where you want it to take you. The doors open whilst the lift is still moving and your foot hits the carpet outside at the exact same moment that the lift stops. Your face creases into a grimace as you think back to Blighty and wonder why Messrs Otis and Schindler send us the factory seconds.

But seriously, why are lifts in the UK so utterly terrible?