And the bloggers chime in...

So, the iPhone SDK was announced (good luck with actually downloading it) and I'm looking forward to playing around with it (no, I'm not going to try to get R running. Let's face it, the iPhone UI is more like, say, Data Desk than anything else). I am getting annoyed with assorted bloggers and pundits bitching about perceived shortcomings.

First, the 70/30 split. That seems to be the biggest complaint. In the words of Dr. Evil, "quite typical, really." Jobs is probably right when he says that it's just enough to cover expenses. Credit card processing ain't free, kids. They might see a little net revenue, but it's in the noise relative to the rest of their business. Basically, apps are a way to sell iPhones, and it'll work.

I also saw someone complain about not being able to change the iPhone UI L&F. Well, yeah. Duh. Apple has seen X11 and knows exactly what happens when you allow that sort of control. Basically, rip-offs of the Windows 95 UI (No, don't expect me to be impressed that you can map Windows 95 on to the sides of a cube and spin it around. At the end of the day you've still got Windows 95 with uglier controls).

Speaking of UI and complete non sequiturs (well, not completely since Salesforce presented in the iPhone thing). I ran across an O'Reilly book this evening at Barnes & Noble called "Designing Dashboards," except that the title was longer. For statisticians with at least a mild interest in presenting results there's nothing there that comes as a surprise (and several areas that could have used some help, color palette selection for example). Clearly the author has read Tufte's books (sparklines even made an appearance). Mostly, though, I'm struck by how absolutely horrible the types of dashboard produced by things like Business Objects and Salesforce (there are others, but these are really popular). The outputs are very expensive in terms of real estate (lots of round things, pie charts and dials and such. Usually in some godawful 3d rendering) and deliver very little, usually a single number. Even when they become more traditional/less junky, the little things really start to stand out. There's a lot of "stop light color" usage, which seems like a good idea but really just induces fatigue (I tried this recently in my own workflow tool and could only stand to use the tool for about 10 minutes. The same dimension is now represented by a much more subtle change in glyph size, which is surprisingly easy to assess at a glance). Even when they move away from stop-light colors there's no rhyme or reason to the color choices nor any apparent internal consistency.

Anyway, I'll probably write more on what I'm learning about visual display of complex information from the workflow tool I've been developing as a place to hang my modeling hat for the last couple of months. I've got a stable core set of users and I use the tool myself literally daily (usually the development version which varies somewhat from the 'production' version). I've also got some things to say about R and databases and workflow in that environment as well.