Buhjillions

So, I bought an iPhone over the weekend. There’s been plenty of praise for the iPhone out there on the web–hell, it came out in the US months ago. Since other sites have pretty much said most of what there is to say about how nice it is, I’ll just say that I love it, and move on.

I wanted to share two aspects of the activation process which struck me–one good, one not so. This is the UK, and so this is O2 we’re talking about, network-wise.

So I got my shiny box home, docked it with the computer, and was off and running in iTunes to do the activation. First snag: I already have an iTunes account from the US (I lived there up until fall 2006), so I put in my username and password at the prompt in the activation window. iTunes informs me that I’ll need a UK-based account to activate my phone.

“Fuck!,” I curse, thinking that iTunes is about to try to force me to repurchase all my US-downloaded tracks in order to use them with my iPhone.

But I enter create a new account, thinking, worst case scenario, I can just burn all my tracks to CD using my laptop, then re-rip them DRM-free. Well, I was pleasantly surprised when it came to sync my music–iTunes happily loaded everything onto the iPhone, and the iPhone has made no complaint about playing them. So, well done there, with the not-screwing-over people-who-move-overseas.

No, the biggest problem came when everything was finished in iTunes and I looked over to my iPhone again. It said it was connecting to the network to complete activation. “Fair enough,” I said. It did some more thinking, and then declared that no network service was available, and that perhaps I should try a different location. “Strange,” thought I, “I’ve never had problems getting mobile service in my room before.” I moved to a window, reset the phone, but still, it came back, “No Service.” I looked through Apple.com’s support pages, through O2’s support pages, and followed their suggestions–including a complete restore of my iPhone to its factory settings, forcing me to go through the tedious process of copying all my music again. I even went out into the street in pajama pants and slippers to give the iPhone a tediously clear view of the night sky. “No Service,” said the iPhone.

I went to bed convinced that there was something wrong with my phone, that the radio was not working, or the internal antenna was left on the factory floor, or something. I didn’t sleep well wondering if I’d be able to get a replacement at my local (Oxford) O2 store, or if I would have to trek all the way back to Regent Street, London to get it sorted. It was horrible!

In the morning, I called O2’s tech line for the iPhone. Well done there, O2, with a dedicated support team for iPhone issues. Phone tree? Tacky, but perhaps a necessary evil. Anyway, a few touch-tones later, I was talking to a real person! No “Your call is important to us”-bullshit or anything. He explained that the “No Service” simply means that O2’s network is backlogged with activations, and that I should have service before the end of the day. By 11:30am, I did have service, and was joyful.

My point, is that descriptive error messages are important! The original message led me to believe that the issue was with my phone or my location, not with their servers. So I tried to fix things by doing resets and taking the phone for a walk and went to bed frustrated. From their perspective, this issue generated an unnecessary call to their service center, and I can imagine I’m not alone in calling in to ask, “what’s the deal?” It probably cost them a lot of extra money which could have been saved by a simple, “Waiting for O2 to activate your phone,” message.

One of my favorite things to show people on my computer these days is a great piece of software called Enso, made by a small company called Humanized, Inc. I started using it about 6 weeks ago and I have not clicked the Start button since. It is quite possibly the best invention in human-computer interaction since high-quality internet search became a reality. It’s also proof positive that Windows users, like myself, have some hope of redemption when we get all jealous of the slick Mac OS X interface improvements—just don’t expect it to come from Redmont.

Enso is a fast, simple, and powerful alternative to the basic interactions you have with your computer: things like opening applications, switching windows, and saving shortcuts or bookmarks. Basically, Enso hangs out in the background until you press the <Caps Lock> key, at which point it snaps to attention for you to begin typing a command. Want to open a program? Photoshop, for example: just type open photoshop. Enso scans through all the items on your start menu as you type and finds anything that matches “photoshop.” The most likely candidate is displayed on top, with alternates listed below. To execute the command, just release the <Caps Lock> key. Brilliant! To hear it described doesn’t do justice to how much faster and easier this system is compared with trolling the start menu, trying to find the folder, then subfolder your shortcut is likely to be in.

But Enso’s usefulness doesn’t stop there. It acts as a kind of universal bookmark/shortcut system, which harnesses your ability to remember language to allow you to access a whole array of items by assigning them names. Highlighting anything—a file, a folder, a program, or a URL—and running the Enso command learn as open <name> stores a link to the object, which can be reached at any future time as open <name>. Common folders, web pages, and files are now only a few keystrokes away, all filed away neatly in my brain by associating them with words. I can certainly remember a lot more of those than I can <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<letter> -style shortcuts. And the most convenient thing is that it works seamlessly with websites: open rss brings up a Firefox Tab with Google Reader, while open quanta takes me directly to my tumblog.

The whole thing reminds me of how computer-sciencey people bemoan the death of the command-line interface (CLI) in favor of the windows, icons, menus, popups (WIMP) interface that form the core interactions on Windows, Macs, and most Linux machines. Yes, the WIMP interface is less intimidating and easier to learn, but it lacks the power of the command-line: you could string together complex commands, piping the output of one program to the input of another, allowing you to put together surprisingly powerful data manipulation commands in one go. Enso, and the paradigm it introduces (or reintroduces) seem to me the first steps toward reclaiming some of that power, while maintaining the approachability and information richness of a graphical interface.

I could go on about other useful commands, like the ability to highlight a word or phrase and issue the command youtube to get search results on youtube.com, or the ability to insert beautiful TeX equations just about anywhere—but seriously, what are you waiting for? Go download the 30 day evaluation version. Now.