No one -in the mainstream- really cares if there is Flash on the iPad or iPhone.

I, personally, don’t care as well. All I care is getting the best experience from what I use, just like the other real users.

Don’t you think that Apple is giving the best user experience (that includes quality of applications & stability of the OS) so far?

Unlike iPhone App Store, iPad’s has three different ways to browse apps (not counting the spotlight view).

First a carousel-like view with 6 apps at a time.

Then another carousel-like view but this time it shows 12 apps at a time. Also this version does not have little circles to show pages. Instead it has numbers at the top.

Finally, another view like the second one, but this time we have a “show more” button at the bottom. When you press it you get 12 more apps.

Two similar navigations, one completely different approach. Not a Apple style solution at all.

In my opinion Apple should have approached this just like the iPhone App Store style.

What’s your opinion? Reply me at @erenemre.

The thing we couldn’t understand is not everyone can use & understand computers like we do. It’s just like we cannot know or understand everything about life, cooking, fishing, relations, history…

So, reaching this site. There are two ways:

• Go to the big white box at the top and type erenemre.com, hit enter.
• Go to Google (or medium white box at the top right) search for eren emre. First result is this site.

If you have no clue about why I’m blogging this, check out these links: Comments to this article, this article or that one.

Ps. World wide web is not for just dummies, it’s for all of us. And our job is to achieve this.

Thanks to the project, every citizen will get a 10 Gb email service. I can’t say for free because if this project becomes a reality, I’m sure the government would create a tax for it. But I’m not sure how a “search engine” project will kill Google, YouTube and Gmail.

And thanks again to the project, all of Turkish citizens’ information will be safe as the chairman says “All internet communication data goes to foreign countries and then it returns. This activity has a security aspect”. Because as all we know, other countries always steal the info in Turkish emails.

YouTube has been banned for almost 2 years (looks like it won’t be opening soon). Google, recently was fined $47m for tax dodging. If you search porn on Google Turkey, the first 20 or more results are banned because of they are “against the morals” of Turkish viewers.

The sad thing about the whole government project is that some people still don’t realize that the government is trying to kill off their communication with the rest of the world. Some think that all this censorship is necessary and that the government should protect them. Some think that they should help the government with building this huge project so they can be proud of the masterpiece that all the world will see.

Let me tell you what’s going to happen if no one says anything, does nothing. Some people will be rich, really rich with the money the Turkish government will pay for the development of the project. The project will be launched in a month or 3 years (either way it’ll suck) and they’ll say “we don’t need any other sites, so let’s just ban them”. And the Chinese, ah I’m sorry the Turkish people will live with their un-monitored, safe search-email-video-site.

Now the long one:

People talk. People criticize. Just like me, right now. Why not a Nokia phone, not a Blackberry or an Android device?

First of all, I love iPhone because of its apps. Let’s agree on this: Apple gave developers a great (for now) platform. They can make good money, prove themselves. I do pay for iPhone apps & games and get what I want: enjoyment. I love being able to do some little photo editing on my iPhone with Mill Colour, uploading them with Flickr’s app. Or getting some inspiration with my one of favorite site’s iPhone app: ffffound’s iFOUND. When I’m hungry, Yelp’s app helps me a lot. I am not even talking about Tweetie, Last.fm, Ghostly Discovery, Ego, and games… Oh wait, do I want to see naked girls when DOW goes down? There is an app for that! Tell me where can I find that big amount of different applications for any kind of device?

3G, the Internet: everywhere. I know checking your email or twitter account every 15 minutes is addiction but come on. That’s the best thing after the invention of the Internet.

I am not the only one. Tons of people out there accepts that having an iPhone is cool.

There are people saying N70 is better than iPhone. Really? Dude, I can do lots of stuff with my fingers that I cannot imagine 10 years before. OK I do accept that Apple is being bitchy about the multi-touch patent, but what can we do?

Google Maps + GPS. These guys saved my life many times. I cannot how I lived before without these!

Now the hard one. I clearly do not find iPhone’s UI/UX usable. It’s clear, it looks awesome but it is definitely not usable. As a user, without reading manuals or tip guides, I cannot know that shaking the phone is undo. Right? Or how can I know that I have to slide my finger to reach easy-delete button on Mail app? I am not saying that guys working doing iPhone’s UI/UX is bad. I am sure they are doing great by putting all that features into this little machine but could be better. Why this is my on love list? Because I’m a designer and thinking on iPhone gives me lots of thing to think about.

Update: Check out some creative apps for iPhone here: http://www.creativeapplications.net/category/iphone/

I shot my first HD videos and I needed a place to show them. There were a few choices, such as Vimeo & YouTube. Vimeo is like a dream to me. I’ve been a member of that community over 2 years and they’re doing a great work. But Vimeo is for more professionals. Since these were my early -junk- videos, I didn’t want to upload them to Vimeo. And so my YouTube journey begun.

YouTube was always like a hot potato for me. I never wanted to touch it, I just watched it. So, I never created a YouTube account either. So now, for these junk videos, I tried to create a YouTube account. YouTube has an option for people that already have a Google Account: “Sign in with your Google Account!”. That’s just for me, fantastic!

Problem one

When you click on “Sign in with your Google Account!” and login with your Google account, there is another registration form. Same as the other “normal” registration form except the password field. The other fields are:

• Username
• Location
• Postal Code
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Word verification (CAPTCHA)
• Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address
• I agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

I already have a Google account, so Google already knows what my location is, what my date of birth is & what my gender is. Also they know that I’m a verified person, not a bot (CAPTCHA).

So, the YouTube team doing a great mistake here: people really don’t need to fill all these fields. I think username and last 2 options are sufficient.

Problem two & three

Like most other web users, I really wanted to skip this form as soon as possible. So I thought, why would YouTube ever need my location info (city & postal code), also my gender. So I left these fields blank and pressed the create my account button.

It refreshed the page and showed me the same registration page with this message:

Please select a valid zip code.

There were 3 blank fields but YouTube said there was 1 error. Also it marked all empty fields with red. It also asked me to re-type the CAPTCHA text. Since it was my second try at registering, I got angry and filled the blanks and clicked on create my account again. I already passed the CAPTCHA test last time but the second time I made a mistake (I’m not good at CAPTCHA at all) and mistyped it. So, for the last time, I filled in the CAPTCHA correctly and got my account, yay!?

YouTube didn’t say which fields are required, so I had to fill the form a second time. Even smallest corporate sites tell you which fields are required in their forms, so why not YouTube? Also it didn’t give the right error messages to help me.

Problem four

So, I finally got my YouTube account. What to do now? Play with my profile details, avatar and then upload my first video right? Let’s try.

I actually liked YouTube’s profile update interfaces. Really well grouped profile fields and marking changed fields feature to remind you are really useful. But if you try to upload an avatar:

You’ll be able to upload a Profile Picture once your account has been active for 48 hours. Please check back then.

What is that? Why is that? Are you afraid of porn avatars YouTube? Or bandwidth issues? Really, please somebody explain it to me. Since I have a Google account over 5 years, why YouTube not trusting me? Or why doesn’t YouTube simply let me to upload my avatar and say me:

Since your account is really fresh, your avatar will be visible to other users in 48 hours.

This would be acceptable. I’ll still wonder why they don’t trust me but I can live with that.

Problem five

Since my camera records in HD, I shot an HD video and wanted to show it HD to my friends. I uploaded it to YouTube, edited its info details and privacy options and started to wait. Because video sites need time to encode your video to their format. After a while, I was able to watch my video, but not in HD.

I didn’t get why it wasn’t in HD. I tried some URL parameters, to show it higher quality but useless. Then I gave up and uploaded my ugly video to Vimeo. Today I checked my YouTube account and I am now able to watch it in HD format. YouTube didn’t give me any information about their encoding process. They just said “we’re encoding it”. I guess, they encode two different versions, one is standard quality and the other one is HD.

YouTube doesn’t send you an email to tell you your video is ready. Vimeo does.

Conclusion

I do respect YouTube and its success. But as you can see, even the biggest companies can make really silly mistakes. You may see the YouTube registration form example in many web pattern galleries or usability blogs. They all say how short and usable it is. Is it really?

And I chose WordPress for my personal blog again. Why? Because it is really easy to install, configure, customize and use. It also has tons of plugins. If this site wasn’t my personal blog, I would prefer Drupal. Because it lets you to do everything and it’s more than personal.

Arguments on WordPress’ administration panel design is one of my favorite topic. Some think, the administration panel design before WordPress 2.7, HappyCog’s design was a dead failure. They say, it wasn’t usable. I don’t. I think, the problem with that design was, it was not designed by real WordPress users. A professional team designed it without any real user experience. It was usable, it was clean but users couldn’t get used to it.

And then, WordPress team, the real WordPress users designed this interface again. They asked their users, they did polls and most of the users love this new admin panel. I am very new to WordPress admin pages but I find everything I’m looking for easily. So, it works for me.

But there are some mistakes, maybe a bit of incoherency in it. Button replacement is a very controversial topic on user interface design. Apple places buttons with negative meanings to the left side on dialog boxes. But Microsoft does exactly opposite:

The thing is, they both use this style of placement everywhere.

What about WordPress? Let’s tall about Quick Edit and Widget Edit layouts. The Quick Edit feature let’s you edit some of your post’s fields like the title or publishing date with some AJAX scripts quickly. Widget Edit boxes are little boxes with 2 text fields that help you edit your sidebar widgets. And here are the button placements for these:

The first part is for Quick Edit, second part is for Widget Edit. An user that is accustom to one interface can easily click on the Remove button and loose data right? Or can have a hard time trying to find where the cancel link is.

Another thing from the Usability Post is about the dashboard: A Slip in the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard Interface.

These are little things but it’s all about usability. Don’t make your users think!