We started off trying to watch it on the tv via AirPlay to the apple tv, from the iPad. That one sentence tells you that apple are certain to raid the tv market. Remove two components from that list.

Anyway it was fail. Every three minutes or so the 4OD app stopped streaming to apple tv. BBC iPlayer in Safari streams fine so it’s either the 4od app not liking AirPlay or a new iOS 5 bug as we did this fine before 5.0.1

We resorted to watching on the MacBook pro as we had done in the past fine.

Harbinger of what was to follow – channel 4 site demanded I upgrade Flash first. Fine

We start watching. Subjected to 3 mandatory viewing ads at the start all is well for a while.

Another ad break, another 3 ads. Some repeated from before. Watch some more.

Oh noes! Pop up message saying there’s an error and the content can’t be played. Video stops. Hmm. Press play again. Starts from beginning.

Watch first three ads I enjoyed so much again. Unmissable, really.

Fast forward to next mandatory ad section to try to get to where we were.

Watch 3 more ads a second time. Its awesome.

Watch some more misfits at last.

Oh noes! Error message again. Video carries on though. Message goes away by itself after many seconds. Hooray! Watch some more.

Error message again! Video stops. Press play again. Yay! Carries on from 2 ad breaks back, but not from the start. We’re blessed! Skip to ad break before last error point. Bonus! Only see 1 repeat ad!

Oh noes! The missing 2 ads are undead and playing in the background somehow – audio is mixed with programme audio. Press space to try to pause to work out what is going on. Pressing space doesn’t pause. It opens a new browser window with an advert for Assassins Creed – one of the ads we were not currently viewing. Soon discover clicking anywhere on the player window launches last ad’s website. Just what I wanted. Especially 5 minutes after avidly watching an ad.

I have no other browser tabs or windows open with the video streams of the ads. Player has simply gone mad. We wait for ads we cannot see but can hear to finish.

Unpause the player, full screen it again, watch more misfits.

Oh noes! Another error message. Video carries on, message obscuring screen for minutes.

Bonus! Audio from ads we cannot see becomes mixed in again! Now I have mastered this streaming tv technology I know to pause the video, mute the audio, wait a few minutes, unmute, resume video. Perfect!

We carry on watching, we’re 38 minutes into a 45 minute programme – but its taken over an hour to get this far. The magic of tv is somewhat eroded. Only in part due to more ads than content.

Oh noes! A few minutes before the end another error message, video stops. Press play… back at the beginning! YES! I had forgotten those original ads at the start that were repeated throughout, and wanted to catch up on those again. Thank you Channel 4.

The final insult, though perhaps merciful: the laptop battery runs out and it all shuts down.

I pick up the iPad, open 4od app, press play on Misfits. Have to watch one short ad, then can instantly jump to the last few minutes and watch it flawlessly while holding the iPad aloft.

This experience speaks volumes about the state of current computing, tv, media, advertising and software development.

If it weren’t for the iOS AirPlay bug none of this would have happened.

Fear the Apple TV chaps.

Oh, and there must be a separate team doing 4OD for iPad, cos the experience is infinitely better than the web one. Far fewer ads. Rapid seeking. No upgrades. No Flash. Great content. Anywhere.

That’s all you need – happy consumers.

And believe it or not that’s what advertisers need.

I’ve been good so far. Here the NSFW summary: OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHAT ON EARTH DO THOSE WANKERS THINK THEY ARE DOING?

Such an interface is called skeumorphic. No I didn’t know that term until recently either.

I will say for a start that I love the iBooks page curl as you turn pages – because it is so impressively done. The page curl in e.g. Kindle for iPad doesn’t come close. It isn’t as interactive (limited axes of movement) and is much slower. This destroys the illusion.

Apple’s implementation is a prime example of “surprise and delight”. For those that care, at least. It must have been hard work getting such a high frame rate off that dynamic page curl code. These people know what they are doing.

However, the wider issue here is that the “wow” element of the implementation may well just be Apple engineers making the best of what has been asked of them.

What I mean here, is that the book metaphor was likely not chosen so they could show off a page curl. It is there for one reason only. Books have pages.

The entire concept of ebooks needs selling to the rest of the world, not to geeks. Geeks like pressing buttons to advance things. They think “realistic” interfaces are lame. It may well be that many people at Apple think so.

However what is Apple’s goal? It’s to sell e-reading to the masses, not the geeks. MG Siegler has had the similar realisation in terms of the entire iPad offering (hmm, wasn’t it obvious from the start when iPad was announced?).

With this in mind you need a drop-dead intuitive user interface. You are also re-framing something that already exists in the real world. Therefore the sensible thing is to supply the same visual cues to the user (recommended reading: The Design of Everyday Things).

If you present a novice user with a straight rendering of an ebook page with no chrome, unless they have used something like this in the past they cannot know for sure how to turn a page. There are too many options:

• Swipe left or right
• Swipe up or down
• Tap left or right
• Tap and wait to see what pops up
• Try to find a button to press
• Shake the device until something happens [AKA curse the geeks who designed this crap]

This is why there is a single visual cue in iBooks – a simple bitmap added which instantly gives the user an idea of what they can do and how they can expect it to work. The page edges:

Now, think about the implications of this. Once you add this simple image to the edge of your display the user is intuitively shown that page traversal will be horizontal.

The user then has an expectation that they can turn the page with their finger, after all that is what other objects (real books) they have with these page edges showing do.

This means you have to implement a dynamic page curl, whether you think it is cheesy or not. It needs to be a shit-hot one or it feels worse than a real book, not equal or better. Remember the sell here is “ebooks are better than real books, they are the future”. The benefits of ebooks are not that they do not have pages – they do – it is that they are portable, searchable etc. Real books have great navigation built in.

This page turning is a necessary introduction for novice users that becomes a major feature and development effort, because it is commercially very important. You need great visuals for everyday (non-geeks) to be impressed by what is essentially a document viewer.

For advanced users, and those new users who start to become more adept, it supports tapping on the left and right sides anyway which users will discover over time. There is no need to go through the effort of swiping – unless you like playing with the effect, which I certainly do because it is a joy to behold.

Unlike the Kindle app’s one which is laggy and feels like you have pages made out of heavy cardboard.

So what I’m saying here is – though I will not pretend to be able to read the minds of Apple – I am pretty sure that this was part of the thought process, it makes perfect sense.

People think Apple are all about design. Apple are all about the user experience. That means that what you see is not always an expression of the best design taste, or even what they themselves would think is the nicest presentation.

Its about the best presentation for everyday non-geeks, who are the people slapping down dollars hand over fist to buy the iPad – not the Android geeks who are still waiting for a non-iPad tablet that’s actually useful.

Usable design is not about elegant zen-like perfection – it’s about making things that people are comfortable with and can use without learning much, if anything.

The page effect on Address Book in OS X Lion however, is a different matter. It serves no purpose except to stop the app looking quite so dull as it did before. Unless there are touch-capable OS X machines out there we don’t know about…

Anyway followbot spam is boring and will just get worse and worse.

So why not require email confirmation with captcha entry for the first follow request, and then random
Spot confirmations on future follows on accounts with a high follow to followed ratio?

Problem solved.

The latest twist, which I noticed some weeks ago, is as follows. Previously lots of problems with CORBA_NO_RESOURCES errors coming back to you when you try to do stuff.

It doesn’t take an IT consultant to guess this means their servers are overloaded.

Which is why I am a little cynical when I see that they have changed all the payment reporting screens to default to show only payments from TODAY by default. Where you used to see a history of recent payments immediately, you always have to select a date range and do a report now.

Why cynical? Well you could argue that this was a cheap way to further inconvenience customers reduce load on the database systems.

Dear Co-op bank. I’m getting more and more people contacting me via blog comments saying how fed up they are. You are going to lose a lot of business if you don’t sort this out.

Support Information
Error Number:    8516
Severity:    E_MT_ERROR
Message:    org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No

A delightful message to show your user. Sounds very much like the system is overrun. Which means either an inability to manage load/scale your system properly, or the system is falling over.

CORBA. Yes CORBA. Really. In 2008.

Co-op bank, I am sick of this, and sick of writing to you about this crap that you forced on us customers. Nothing changes. No announcements. No road map. No improvement.

I’m getting very close to registering co-op-online-business-banking-sucks.com and setting up a forum for people to air their complaints…