Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to
Page’s open cubicle office for a review.
As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.
“It’s too slow,” Page said.
Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted.
It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.
“You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office,
he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds
for Gmail to load.
It is quite plausible for people who being to obsess over a certain aspect to become overly sensitive to it. In my case, a lifetime of playing high speed video games makes it possible to notice things that others miss when it comes to things like framerates and microstutter in computer graphics. I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.
Quite possible. It's also possible that Jobs & Page made all kinds of more or less random comments, and people remembered and retold the stories about the times they were strikingly correct.
I'd guess the truth is somewhere between the two.
You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds and 1000 milliseconds. The rest is guessing work.
It's the same thing with the width of elements on the web. Know what 10px is, and you will be able to guess anything.
It turns out I'm not nearly as good as I thought. I can nail a delay of 100,200,...,900ms exactly only about 40% of the time, and within +-100ms about 80% of the time.
If anyone else feels like trying, you can do "go get github.com/erinok/howlonghowlong". Hit space to see a flash, and then type 1-9 for how long you think the flash was.
It's surprisingly fun. (At least if you're incredibly weird like me.)
I find I'll have periods of concentration where I can just nail it, and then it'll leave me, and I'll be sloppy.
And thinking about it, in Trackmania it was less a perception of time that you noticed, but a sense of how smoothly and perfectly you had hit every turn. You could easily race the almost the exact same time multiple times in a row, and then feel it when you hit a turn more smoothly and shaved a few fractions of a second off your time. (Or similarly feel it when you screwed up and added a few seconds.)
Man, thinking about this is making me miss trackmania :)
But that misses the point of the Jobs story. Some people really do have sensitivity to things that the vast majority of others have trouble perceiving. Most people would have trouble perceiving a millimeter difference in spatial dimension by touch.
Having said all of that... the likelihood that the Project Manager in the original story... or even that the Project Manager in your workplace for that matter... is the maven that Steve Jobs was is remote in the extreme.
Sen no Rikyu, a tea-master, wished to hang a flower basket on a column. he asked a carpenter to help him, directing the man to place it a little higher or lower, to the right or left, until he had found exactly the right spot. "That's the place," said Sen no Rikyu finally.
The carpenter, to test the master, marked the spot and then pretended he had forgotten. Was this the place? "Was this the place, perhaps?" the carpenter kept asking, pointing to various places on the column.
But so accurate was the tea-master's sense of proportion that it was not until the carpenter reached the identical spot again that its location was approved.
from here: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans
There is a tendency when one is running or developing a product to convince yourself that your efforts are producing a genuinely good product that your customers will like. Frequently that isn't true, and the product is rightly trashed by the outsiders. The thing is, the people on the inside would have trashed it too if they had not been insiders.
Jobs seems to have had the ability to resist this self-deception. He was ruthlessly honest about how good the things Apple was making actually were and not at all afraid to reject things because some aspect was poor.
All the praise in your comment only really works if the change is a clear improvement.
http://cdn.mactrast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2012-11-2...
Apples design is hit and miss like everyone else.
(fixed the arm problem with physio and massage)
However, the apple trackpad on my macbook air seems to work great. I like this more than even ordinary mice, which can sometimes aggravate the issue.
In contrast, my wrist hurts just thinking about the Mighty Mouse or whatever it's called.
The wireless (which is what I'm using at the moment) is okay, but it's not the same.
I've got some dead ones in the junk pile. When I get some time I'm going to see if I can cobble together a working unit from them.
When will Chrome offer the option of switching to a new tab when its link is clicked on? Firefox has had it forever.
When will the big browsers be programmable? I'm currently running uzbl[0] because I want to set my own hotkeys in my browser. I tried 4 different 'emacs bindings' extensions for other browsers until I just figured out that none of these is gonna get it completely right.
The good thing in all of this is that I now control the behavior and features of my browser myself. I've made features that wouldn't even be possible in Firefox/Chrome. Not because it should be all that hard, but because they just don't let you actually do anything with them.
Browsers are pretty much like e-mail clients. They all suck. Some suck less than others, but it's actually striking how bad the sum total of all the browsers' usability is. Ironically I had to switch to a browser that wasn't trying to be a modern browser to get the browser experience that I wanted.
Links: [0] - http://www.uzbl.org/
Like I said, I had to turn away from everything that tried to be a modern browser to realize that most modern browsers are shit, FF/Chrome with these extensions included. Browsers have not evolved well and are mostly designed to be huge monoliths with little to no transparency and programmability. Vimperator and pentadactyl don't remedy this.
Also I thought "hockey puck mouse" was an old DEC mouse. Dec as in, "my Vaxstation is better than your Mac, cause it has a mouse AND it's still a VAX." (I still like saying "VAX" Side-effect: I start SHIFTING INTO ALL CAPS. )
Paul
My other issue is eyestrain. I can type text without looking at the screen, so I tend to prefer text based interfaces. And keyboard shortcuts are a way to rest from overuse of pointing devices. (i.e., overuse of our bodies)
Remember the urban legend about the QWERTY keyboard, that it was designed to slow us down in order to distract us from how slow typewriters were? Sometimes I wonder if the modern GUI has turned into something like that: Simple tasks require us to control the computer's sequence of operations through extensive manual and ocular labor, rather than us just telling it what we want it to do.
Just a weird thought, offered for amusement.
I was sad when they replaced it.
I've always wondered why people hate on it so much -- even if someone prefers to point with their arm rather than their fingers, surely they can understand the appeal of using fingers to point at things?
[0] an attitude I find myself unthinkingly adopting when doing reviews.
hard to ask for it without it seeming completely petty, particularly when everything else is perfect. it does represent a minor improvement.
Naming is important. Bad function names are a bug in the API, just like any other API bug.
Non-native speakers frequently struggle naming things even more than native speakers, especially when they have to deal with a problem domain for the first time.
Just like any other mistake, bad function names usually aren't intentional -- often quite the opposite. I remember struggling with naming business domain related functions and variables in the first booking system I worked on, especially because the UI wasn't localized into English, so I had no direct reference. Should this class be called Invoice or Bill? Are the terms "netto" and "brutto" commonly used in English as they are in German? What's the proper plural of "index"? And so on.
Having tactful help from a native speaker can be a huge advantage.
As an aside, I recently saw a job listing that included the requirement to be able to "defend your code in reviews" - I would say that's an environment where reviews probably aren't positive experiences.
As an intern, I've had many times where I'd say "I did it this way using A B and C, is that the best way? Are there any improvements you'd suggest?" after completing work. But in a more senior position, you probably don't want people second guessing / not really understanding these decisions.
Consider it this way: natively speaking English means you have domain knowledge, sharing that domain knowledge should feel no different from pointing out mistakes in other domains. If someone gets English wrong, that's no different from getting, say, VAT calculation wrong.
Maybe I'm just assuming everyone already handles mistakes in other domains with tact and respect.
Also, it's a matter of proportion. If a function name is extremely misleading that's different from a function name just using an awkward synonym, just as a broken piece of code is different from dodgy indentation. You'll want to fix either problem eventually, but the immediate repercussions are quite different (serious bug vs minor annoyance, basically).
I think we're generally in agreement – I was trying to keep the focus on things which can be reasonably be considered objectively wrong and keeping the degree of wrongness in mind when deciding how to handle it. If you're on the low end of that scale, it's probably not a good use for everyone's time in a code-review session unless it happens a lot.
I never said he was right or that I agreed with him, in fact I hate Apple Mice and actually find them too small. No idea where you are even getting that.
My point is that Steve Jobs was renowned for an obsessive, manic attention to exactly these kinds of detail and usually knew what he wanted and would blow up when he didn't get it; so it takes a special kind of person to dodge Occam's razor and go looking for some other explanation.
You called dchichkov's argument "idiotically cynical". That's a personal attack, even if you didn't mean it that way.
>I never said he was right or that I agreed with him, in fact I hate Apple Mice and actually find them too small. No idea where you are even getting that.
When you say "completely revolutionize multiple technology industries ACTUALLY had vision and a sense of aesthetics" in response to a comment that suggested he was reading expressions, that very heavily implies that Steve was correct. You need to work on wording if you have "no idea" how I got that impression.
>a special kind of person
This sounds like a personal insult again.
I don't know why you're so vehemently against the idea.
No, I'll admit I meant it that way and I'll stand by it. What I meant is that it isn't a personal issue for me as I thought you were claiming. Those are different things.
> When you say "completely revolutionize multiple technology industries ACTUALLY had vision and a sense of aesthetics" in response to a comment that suggested he was reading expressions, that very heavily implies that Steve was correct. You need to work on wording if you have "no idea" how I got that impression.
No. I'm saying I believe (assuming the story is true) Jobs correctly detected the 1mm difference. I'm also saying I don't agree that the 1mm difference was the right call, certainly not for me. Jobs sense of aesthetics resulted in many great products but a few duds as well.
My point is that since Jobs is literally (in)famous for attention to small details and being a complete hard ass about seeing those details through to the end product, it is silly to not only question a story about his attention to small details but to offer another option as "most likely".
It does not mean I think Jobs walked on water and was always right.
This has blown up way farther than a quick throw away line.
The blog post I think was talking more about people who just have to change something to 'make their mark' and usually the mark makers are the managers, not the doers or the designers, making arbitrary changes so they feel validated, or powerful, or in control, who knows.
Steve knew what was nice though, indisputably, and in Australia we have the saying "Who's rooting this cat?", in Steve's case he was the one rooting it, whereas the PM in the blog post barely even knew the cat.