Iconify

I needed an Icon for the project, something to stick in the corner of the Admin page. So here it is; the perfect visual metaphor (for now) of what we're building.

It's a distributor assembly, in case you're wondering. That's the input gearing on the left, and the distributor cap on the right. I coloured it a little. Hopefully the icon evokes these ideas:

• We're writing a distributor.
• It's for Google App Engine
• It's intended to be a component of a larger system
• It's pretty neat, although most of that is hidden inside.
• The first time you see it, you think it might be a spaceship.

The problem is, now that the project has been given a metaphor, it's hard to resist it. I've caught myself wondering whether I should rename classes to 'Plugs' and 'Points'.  At the moments those classes are named 'Filters' and 'Tracks', because what happens inside the distributor has a much better visual metaphor:

And there's the problem with metaphors, and icons; at some point the conceit breaks down, the analogy gets pushed too far, and it stops helping. In fact, it can freeze people's thinking and give them... sorry... one track minds.

Case in point: the original Macintosh OS, where you had to drag a disk into the trash to eject it. Obviously.

So why do we use icons and visual metaphors at all, if they are ultimately flawed? "Draw me a picture of the software"? I may as well ask you for an interpretive dance, for all the relevance it has to the original form. The only visual representation of the program that truly matters is this one:

But it does lack something in the way of brevity and wit. Hard to put on a T-shirt.

Perhaps that's all icons are; attempts at witty visual puns. That would mean the ultimate compliment for an icon is the same - People who don't know what it represents, once told, should groan loudly and emphatically at the terrible joke.

Icons are going through a bit of a recession at the moment, not like the profligate WIMP-fueled software binges of the late 90's, where every TreeView and ListView had a pallet of pictures. Every menu item  it's own little abstract work of art beside it. ("Ahh.. I see... It's a man with an umbrella leaning into the wind, clearly the Firewall Settings option.")

If you take GMail to be an exemplar of the modern web GUI, there are barely any icons at all! Buttons and menus have been stripped down to bare text, because it turns out that the shape of a word can be just as iconic as a 16x16 block of pixels. Perhaps more so, since people tend to recognize them without being primed. Meaning comes pre-attached, rather than having to be learned.

Partly this is because people are more familiar with computers than ever, and no longer need metaphors for the simple operations. 'Cut', 'Copy' and 'Paste' are no longer abstract terms from the editor's desk, they're just taken for granted. We've forgotten where the 'Tab' key came from, because computers are not really typewriters, no matter how hard a generation pretended.

Computers are computers. They are not like anything else. That's their greatness.

I believe in 'honest' user interfaces which try to reveal the inner workings of the problem, while giving you tools to help to solve it. The bad interfaces are the ones that hide, and obfuscate and pretend. (usually in the name of 'user friendliness' and designed by someone in sales)

The worst ones put that condescending 'please wait...' message on the screen while thoroughly trashing your hard drive, on the basis that you don't need to know what the program is doing, because it's smarter than you. And you are allowed no way to stop it. Bloody Wizards.

Computers are machines. So if they are like anything else, it would probably be a photocopier. Sometimes you just have to pull it open and rip out the crumpled, smoking shreds of paper before it will work properly again.

Once again this topic was covered by the Master, years ago:

"The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can't possibly go wrong is that when something that can't possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." - Douglas Adams