Why the hype?

I just read Dan Moren’s (Macworld.com) article on Apple’s iPhone Push Notifications system and how Apple seem to stopped talking about it. I guess thousands of developers are waiting for a solution, but push notifications may just not be it. I mean, that would be something, but it won’t solve all the limitations an application has by being allowed to run only on foreground.

The iPhone is a great platform and it surely means, above all, Cocoa in your pocket. Although, there’s a lot on the background that Cocoa apps are missing.

I hope Apple didn’t bury this feature. Push, over-the-air, notifications can be useful and I can surely see where they can be put into use. Still, I guess everyone wants more: sending an application to background while the user checks his email or text someone—and keep downloading something on your app, for instance.

I’ve been looking more and more around myself, looking for interesting things. Some of them amaze me, some bore me and others sadden me.

This is not something I have done for long. Fred got me into this “experience” thing. Working (and having dinner almost daily, and shopping, and getting bored) with a design and experience addict taught me a sense I never knew I had: minding small details. Now I find myself observing instead of just looking. Often I take a second, deeper look at things, think about them, and sometimes take pictures of things like weird messages, great interfaces or poorly-designed objects.

Today, to start off this series, I have a picture of an eating place on a mall that got me confused for an instant:

Where do I put the parenthesis? Does this mean that I should:

a) choose a juice OR a soup - and have the dessert in both cases: (Juice OR Soup) AND Dessert;

b) pick either juice OR the soup and the dessert: Juice OR (Soup AND Dessert)?

Although the former seems more likely to be the correct answer, to me always having a dessert seems as odd as having to choose between “just juice” and “soup and dessert”.

There’s a solution to this ambiguity through design: breaking the sentence into two lines would make it much easier to tell what the choices here really are.