3 posts tagged “review”
I finished reading Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" earlier today. This is a book about the importance of interaction design that looks at the computer interface problems and proposes an approach for making better software by focusing on personas (the people who will use the software) and goals (what those people want to accomplish by using the software). It is an interesting book on the intersection of design and software development and it has many good lessons to impart.
I was particularly intrigued by one design principle that he introduces: polite software is self-confident. A quick blurb:
If I tell the computer to discard a file, I don't want it to come back to me and ask, "Are you sure?" Of course, I'm sure, otherwise I wouldn't have asked. I want it to have the courage of its convictions and go ahead and delete the file.
On the other hand, if the computer has any suspicion that I might be wrong (which, of course, is always), it should anticipate my changing my mind and be fully prepared to undelete the file. In either case, the product should have confidence in its own actions and not weasel, whine, and pass the responsibility off onto me.
This blurb hit on a problem that I've been working on for a little while now. At the moment, I'm in the process of giving Books a bit of a user interface overhaul. I'm not changing the look and feel of the windows or anything like that. Instead, I've been looking at the little things that I can do to make the app smoother and more intuitive for my users. I've been doing this by revamping preferences, slightly modifying the behavior of existing interface elements, and eliminating vestigial ones where possible.
Cooper's paragraphs above instantly reminded me of the dialog boxes that Books throws up when you want to delete a list or book record. Currently, unless the item being deleted is an empty list, Books asks for confirmation that you really want to get rid of the data. Cooper's principle suggests that I should get rid of these timid modal dialogs that interrupt the flow of using the application. Books is built upon CoreData, which provides a nice data store that includes undo and redo functionality. I could eliminate the dialogs and it is possible to undo the deletions.
The problem that I have with doing this is that I'm not sure that all of my users understand how to undo something. I suspect that undo makes sense in the context of editing text or other individual fields, but I worry that they don't know that it works in the context of adding and deleting objects that hold data, such as book records and lists. To further complicate things, CoreData keeps its "undo" information in memory, meaning that quitting the application forgets the "undo" information between program sessions. I can easily imagine a user accidentally deleting a list of books, quitting the application, and restarting it to find their data missing. After this happened, I would probably get an angry e-mail about the incident.
One solution to this problem would be to implement an analog of a trash bin in the application. Users delete records and they get moved to the trash bin. They are only truly deleted when the user "takes the trash out" and deletes the contents of the bin. The trash can could be saved between sessions (it could be just another list), thereby conforming to Cooper's principle. On the other hand, I wonder if the addition of a trash can adds complexity to the interface. Another problem with the trash metaphor is that it would function for all intents and purposes as a list. This works fine when book records are deleted, but what happens when a list is deleted? Does the list show up in the trash or are lists simply deleted instantly?
Another question that demands an answer is one of recurring costs. If records were being added and deleted regularly, a metaphor like the trash can would be necessary. I would become annoyed if my e-mail application constantly asked me whether I wanted to delete a message. On the other hand, within Books, records are added more often than they are deleted and these deletions are relatively infrequent. Is this infrequent timidity less troublesome than introducing a new complexity to the user model (the trash bin) that is present the entire time the software is in use?
I've been thinking about this throughout the day. I go back and forth between the status quo and implementing changes that would make my code more bold and confident. I don't have an answer yet, but this book has forced me to think about details such as these and to ask myself whether I can be making my own code more usable and humane. By forcing me to confront these questions, this book has already had a positive influence on my own work.
I promise that this blog won't become a 24/7 Lovecraft affair, but I wanted to share some recent reviews of Lovecraft-related media. In this post, I'll be covering print, audio, and video.
The print entry is August Derleth's "The Cthulhu Mythos". This is a Barnes & Noble compilation of Derleth's Cthulhu mythos tales. For those unfamiliar with Derleth, he was a late entry into the Lovecraft circle and after Lovecraft's death he (rightly or wrongly) assumed control of Lovecraft publishing. "Mythos" is a collection of Derleth's tales that build upon the Lovecraft mythos, primarily centered around the entities Hastur and Cthulhu. In Derleth's adoption, Hastur and Cthulhu are members of the "Ancient Ones", a collection of powerful evil entities that rebelled against "The Elder Gods" and were cast to the four corners of the universe. In Derleth's tales, Hastur remains imprisoned among the stars, while Cthulhu is cast below the depths of Earth's seas. Despite their confinements, the Ancient Ones find ways to war against each other, using lower races as proxies and soldiers. In this collection, the big conflict is between Hastur's circle of humans and Cthulhu's fish-like Deep Ones.
I'm not going to get into the debate of whether Derleth's injection of a Christian-inspired good versus evil into the Lovecraft mythos was appropriate. (That's a bigger debate than this post could handle.) I will say that I found Derleth's tales to be a mixed bag. The book opens up with several almost identical stories about a Derleth-created entity called Ithaqua that I found to be rather poor and boring. I really didn't start enjoying the book until I read the short story about a guy and his buddy summoning and dismissing monsters and botching the process. I don't know if the story was meant to be dark humor, but I found it pretty funny.
The other highlight of the book was the collection of Professor Laban Shrewsbury stories that finished the book ("The Trail of Cthulhu"). These short stories are each part of a much larger story describing a mysterious professor working to eliminate Cthulhu's avenues of exit from the city of R'lyeh. The story begins in 1938 and continues past the end of the second World War with the professor and his recruits bombing and assassinating Cthulhu agents around the world. The series ends with the climax where Shrewsbury convinces the American military to detonate a nuclear weapon over the island first described in Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" to seal the Ancient One in the R'lyeh under the sea. I think that this single act (nuking Cthulhu) is probably the point in the extended mythos that separates the classic Lovecraft and Derleth stories from the more modern interpretations by creators like Charles Stross and Mike Mignola.
In the end, I found the book to be a mixed bag of stories that kept me riveted to the book and stories that put me to sleep. I originally picked up the book for a single dollar, and I believe that I got my money's worth. Certainly check out "The Trail of Cthulhu", but feel free to skip the rest.
My only complaint with the film is at the end where Cthulhu emerges from the island to pursue the human interlopers. The film's producers used a form of stop-motion animation to create the monster, but it didn't really work for me. I know that they didn't have a special effects budget, but I wonder if they might not have been better served by showing less Cthulhu and keeping the Ancient One in the shadows. I think that hinting rather than showing would have been more effective. (The way Galactus is presented in the most recent Fantastic Four film is a good example of relying upon the audience's imagination to present the unpresentable.)
In the end, I really enjoyed the film and it's an interesting addition to my DVD collection. The whole retro-schtick completely won me over, and I liked the style so much that I purchased a copy of the movie poster for the day when I have my dedicated movie room.
The HPLHS website has a CD and MP3 version for sale, and I'd highly recommend the compact disc. You'll have to wait for it to arrive via post, but included with the disk are prop photos, drawings, and a newspaper page related to the story. These are fun additions to have while listening. My only complaint was that the audio editing was a bit weak in the section where the radio newsman is interviewing members of the expedition via radio. It was hard to hear in parts, and I think that realism could have been sacrificed a bit in this case to facilitate easy listening.
I highly recommend both the "The Call of Cthulhu" DVD and the "At Mountains of Madness" radio play. Both can be purchased online at the HPLHS online store.
On Friday, I finally finished Charles Stross's Lovecraftian spy thriller "The Jennifer Morgue". It is the second book in the Bob Howard series that follows the former Unix system administrator as he undertakes cloak-and-dagger jobs as part of a secret British gov't organization called "The Laundry". For those not following along, in Bob Howard's world, Alan Turing completed a comptational-demonology theorem called "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning". This theorem (also called the Turing-Lovecraft theorem), creates breaches between universes using some spiffy computational mathematics that routinely attract the attention of big nasties on the other side of this reality's veil.
Because of the nasty things that "go bump in the night", Howard's secret organization is tasked with keeping the rest of us safe from these creatures. In "The Jennifer Morgue", we discover in the opening pages that Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer wasn't trying to recover just any sunken Soviet submarine, but a special one that was trying to phone in to a deceased but very active denizen of the depths. From the initial recovery mission in the 1960's, we readers are taken on a roller coaster ride consisting of spies, demons, and the occasional encounter with a drone from HR.
For an actual review done by someone who knows how to do reviews, read Stuart Carter's take on the book.
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Now that you're finished reading that, here's my take on the book: I really enjoyed it. It was schlocky in some places, but it was all done in good fun and in homage to Ian Fleming and the James Bond "mythos". I continue to appreciate Stross's use of the Lovercraft mythos. Rather than cast the creatures on one side or the other, Schloss is faithful to Lovecraft and largely keeps the creatures that be out of the affairs of the bald monkeys that they allow to exist on a small subset of the Earth's surface.
I also loved Stross's continued references back to the Lovecraft canon, including a repurposed Dunwich village, descendants of Innsmouth in the service of various world governments, and especially the repurposed Erich Zann violin. In an essay between "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue", Stross pens an insightful essay on how the Lovecraftian horror story and the Cold War spy novels are manifestations of the same thing, only with different faces. While "The Atrocity Archives" reads like a classic Robert Ludlum novel, "The Jennifer Morgue" completes the circle by simultaneously imitating and lampooning Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. (A significant portion of the actual plot of the story deals with the Bond archetypes applied in occult settings. How's that for meta?)
In short, I feel that if there were such a thing as custom created fiction, Stross's novels would be the one that the novel machine would spit out for me. It includes elements from some of my favorite kinds of novels, tied in to some of my other interests that I've randomly been picking off over the last few years (including a minor interest in one Howard Hughes). The in-jokes were great and some things introduced in the book (such as including zombie-creating PowerPoint slide transitions) will leave me looking at real-life with a more humorous lens.
In a letter to Robert E. Howard (Stross's protagonist's namesake?), Lovecraft addressed the great fun he was having when other people were claiming that he wasn't writing fiction, but was instead telling the truth:
Stross certainly adopted this technique in his own books and applies it with maximum effectiveness. Why write a spy/horror tale that takes place in some completely fictitious setting when one can repurpose plenty of colorful characters and events from our own history?Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.—let me confess that this is all a synthetic concotion of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana... Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his - in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation. I ought, though, to write Mr. O’Neail and disabuse him of the idea that there is a large blind spot in his mythological erudition!
(By the way, I'm a huge fan of the cover art for this book. I'd love to see the Bond-esque opening credits of this book should it ever be adapted for the silver screen.)
