Early reviews of Google+ are in and they’re generally positive. Obviously, not everybody love Google’s latest social network experiment, but I’d like to debunk one piece of criticism that keeps being repeated over and over. And that is, that the Google+ Circles feature is basically the same thing as Facebook’s Friend Lists.

Facebook Friend Lists lets users group friends under different lists; family, co-workers, etc., so that you can share things with subsets of your overall Facebook friends. As in real life, you don’t share everything with all the people you know, and with the Friend Lists feature you can emulate that. Sounds very similar to Circles right?

The problem with Friend Lists is the poor usability of this feature. Unlike Circles, you get the feeling that this feature was tacked on, and that it’s not a central component of the service. Creating and assigning people to Circles in Google+ is a lot easier and friendlier than managing Friend Lists, just look at this video from Google which gives you a good overview of how the Google interface handles this.

The main problem with Friend Lists is that once setup they’re a pain to use, which is probably why a lot of Facebook users either don’t know about this feature or don’t bother to use it.

Let’s try to share a message only intended for our family;

First non-obvious thing you have to do is click on the padlock icon. This icon gives you 4 choices; “Everyone“, “Friends of Friends“, “Friends Only” and “Customize“. Unlike Circles, it doesn’t list your Circles of friends or in this case your Friend Lists. What you have to do here is select the “Customize” option which opens up the “Custom Privacy” dialog.

The “Custom Privacy” dialog now gives us another 4 choices; “Friends of Friends“, “Friends Only“, “Specific People…“, “Only Me“. Again, Facebook decides not to show you your Friend Lists, and to select one you have to chose the “Specific People…” option. Now, in the previous screen, we already told the interface we don’t want to send a message to “Friends Only” or “Friends of Friends”, why is it showing us these options again? Bad UI design.

There’s also the strange option to only share an item with yourself (“Only Me“), I guess that’s usefull to save things and share them later. But instead of listing this, I’d rather see my family Friend List.

To find our desired list, again we select “Specific People…“ (1), which shows an empty text entry field. As we start typing “f” for family (2), Facebook is nice enough to show us friends with first or last names that contain the letter “f”. Note that I have so many friends with that letter that in none of the choices my family Friend List shows up. After typing a bit more, “fa” (3), we still see other friends but at the bottom of the choices we finally see our family Friend List. Finally we select it (4) and our family list is added to the field.

Another bad design choice is how Friend Lists are mixed in with regular (singular) friends, at the very least it would be nice to get a visual hint that something is a Friend List vs a singular specific friend.

We then click “Save Setting” at the bottom right of the dialog and go back to our Facebook wall. Obviously, the last step is to press the “share” button, unfortunately Facebook doesn’t make it clear what Friend List or group of friends I’m sharing with. To see that, you need to click again on the padlock icon which instead of indicating what Friend List is selected, it shows a cryptic “Custom edit” selected item on the padlock popup menu. Not clearly showing who we’re sharing with makes it easy to share the wrong thing with the wrong group of people by accident. Again, bad UI design.

And that’s how Friend Lists are used in Facebook. The feature is hidden via the padlock icon, the option is not clear (“Customize“), selection is cumbersome, and Facebook does its best to hide away Friend Lists from the user. It’s almost as if the UI is designed on purpose to discourage the use of this feature.

In contrast, in the Google+ interface, you simply type the text you want to share (or image, video, etc.) and then click on the “Share” button;

From right there you can select with Circle of friends you want to share with. The Circle can be typed in or selected from the list, if it’s not shown in the list simply clicking “more …” will show the rest of the Circles. Unlike Facebook, Circles are not hidden but featured front and center. In this case 2 clicks allow me to quickly select who I want to share with.

Another key usability item to note, once a Circle is selected, Google+ makes it very clear who you are sharing with. In this example we can see the family Circle highlighted in blue and with a Circle icon to denote it represents a group of people. Singular friends added to the group, will also be shown highlighted in blue but without the Circle icon to differentiate them with Circles.This is much better than clicking on a padlock and trying to figure out who “Custom edit” is.

Simply put, when contrasting both approaches we note that;

1. Google has spent a lot more effort on usability in their User Interface design; minimizing clicks, removing the need for additional dialogs, preventing users from sharing information with an unintended Circle, etc.
2. Circles is a key and central feature of Google+, whereas Friend Lists seems more like a feature added as an afterthought, rather than a fundamental aspect of how people share information with different groups of friends.

It is clear that Google+ Circles are friendlier and easier to use than Facebook Lists. On this one central aspect of sharing, it seems Google has done their homework while Facebook really needs to evaluate and reinvent their approach to usability.

So Delta has a cute “We’re Experiencing Some Turbulence” error message when they have an internal error on their website. I’ve seen this error many times before, I think the first time I chuckled a bit.

The other day I was enjoying the new Wi-Fi Delta offers in some of their flights. I checked my email, my facebook account, everything worked great. Then it occured to me to check my delta account. I was wondering if they credit your miles after take off or later when you land (yeah I was bored). Suddenly, I get the familiar error message; “We’re Experiencing Some Turbulence“. I go, “oh crap” what’s going on? For a couple of seconds I forgot I was getting an error message for a website, and thought I was reading a message about my flight, a problem serious enough that they bothered to notify me via the new Wi-Fi connection.

Now I did say it was a couple of seconds, of course I quickly realized this had nothing to do with my flight. But for a couple of seconds I did get a bit freaked out by the message, specially seeing it on my browser. It got me thinking; how did my brain go into alert mode that quick when I know better?

It was all about context.

The context in this situation is this; traveling on Delta flight, on the official Delta website, checking my account and current flight information and then getting a message mentioning a very specific phrase about air travel. Obviously, if I get this message at my home, the train or the airport there’s no problem. Everything changes once I’m on a situation that is directly related to the term used in the error message.

So it’s probably not a good idea to keep these cute error messages, when you think that there’s a new context for use of this site. Before it wasn’t possible to read this from a plane but now it is. It just highlights how sometimes when you consider usability, you have to think about all the possible scenarios that your users will be in while interacting your application.

BTW, I’d love to hear from other people on potential error messages that might be scary in other contexts.

The screenshot above is from Anthony Rogers’ blog (UI designer for the tool), and the next one is from Chris Oliver’s blog, who successfully managed to hide away from most of the geek crowds at JavaOne.

The design of the tool is looking really nice and clean, the timeline reminds me a bit of the Adobe Premiere CS4 one. But unlike Premiere or Flash CS4, one interesting design choice is the lack of row headers to identify the different elements or categories for the rows in the timeline. This makes it look a bit cleaner and less cluttered, but it would be interesting to see if this doesn’t make it more difficult to track just what it is you are supposed to be controlling in that part of the timeline. Hard to tell without trying the tool of course (hint, hint, Sun … available for alpha/beta testing!).

I haven’t seen a single bit of code in any of the screenshots/demos so far. I wouldn’t be surprised that there was some script text area somewhere, or maybe the expectation is that for code you go to a tool like Netbeans?

Tor Norbye also provides some additional information about the tool, it will be available as a webstart application that will let you save data in the “cloud” (like Google Docs) or locally, as well as run the tool online/offline.

Chris calls it the JavaFX Design tool, others the JavaFX Authoring tool, for sure neither of these is the final name for the product but I’m still a bit surprised it doesn’t seem to have any sort of funky codename at this point.

You can watch some short videos of the tool in action here.

I have to say, the most difficult part of preparing this presentation was trying to figure out the Spanish version of common programming words and concepts. Part of the problem is that when I was learning how to program in Panama (when I was around 10-12 years old) all of my resources; magazines, books, etc where all in English. So I never knew that array is “arreglo”, that a developer is called a “desarrollador”, or what the corresponding word for loop is. It would be really nice if there was some type of resource out there with a table with all these terms, and maybe other languages. One challenge is that it seems not all of these words are “settled”. I noticed some people were still pretty comfortable with the English versions, while others used the Spanish ones exclusively. Also, there are a lot of emerging technologies and concepts in Computer Science which I think still don’t have Spanish translations. Pretty much a more difficult challenge than I expected.

One more thing, JavaFX has changed a lot in the last year. When I did this presentation, I didn’t cover how much effort has gone into optimizing this technology or the new changes to the animation API (like the deprecated dur keyword). There is a preview JFX SDK coming out next month, and you can sign up for it at javafx.com. I didn’t attend JavaOne this year, so I don’t know all the details, but I’m hoping the SDK comes with some of the tooling that Sun has promised. Designer level tools are key to this technology’s success. I hope to make a blog post with a quick review of the SDK once it comes out.

So yesterday at CommunityOne there were some hints about some developments on the Java client side. I guess it’s obvious to guess at this point, minutes before today’s JavaOne keynote that it’s going to be about JavaFX. This technology seems like a direct competitor with Adobe’s Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight, and may leverage existing installations of the Java VM. More details today of course.

We’ve already seen JavaFX, it comes from a project called F3 (Form Follows Function). I was lucky enough to reserve a spot at one of those talks, and I’m glad because I’m sure it’s going to get filled up pretty soon after this has been officially announced.

Things I would like to see addressed:

• What support is there for media (JMF is old and crusty)? If there’s anything new, can we take advantage of it on regular Java SE apps?
• Does this include a smaller client footprint? (stripped down JVM?)
• Is this project seen as a replacement of Applet technology?
• Would it be possible to create JavaFX apps with Java?
• F3 introduces it’s own scripting language ,would it be possible to easily interact with existing Java code?
• Tool support. If I’m creating an animation, will there be visual editors (a timeline?) for an artist to compose the app?

Questions, questions, questions …

Update 1: JavaFX site open now!

https://openjfx.dev.java.net

There’s even an Netbeans plugin available (downloading now …)

When I launch Netbeans 5.5, it seems I’ve installed some version control module that produces these two dialogs whenever I start the IDE. I still can’t figure out what the program wants me to do here. First of all, it has to be a bug and not a feature that it’s popping up 2 modal dialogs at the same time. Very annoying. However, what really confuses me is that one dialog is for “CVS” and the other for “VCS“, which adds to the confusion because just by looking at the text you really get the terms confused. (I’m guessing I get these because they are 2 different but related Netbeans Modules/Plugins)

But the worst part is that I’m not sure what these dialogs are trying to tell me. Both say that a module is being installed, while an older version of the source control infrastructure is being disabled. Both dialogs have almost the same exact text, but one at least is telling me that it “strongly recommends I restart the IDE after the installation is complete”. The question is, why do I have to do this manually? I’m not even sure when the installation is complete, there’s no visual indication. Wouldn’t it be better to bother me about the restart option once you are ready? Even better, how about restarting the IDE when it needs to do this (Would you like to restart the IDE so VCS/CVS modules can complete their installation?).

I also don’t know how to get rid of these dialogs. I get the impression I’m not supposed to do any manual operation, but I keep getting them. Perhaps it’s time to blast my current installation and start over again, which is never a fun thing to do.