This is something that I’ve meant to mention here since Merlin and Danny’s talk at etech 2005, wherein was discussed the problem of email.
Email, as has been thoroughly discussed already by people far smarter than I (smarter than me? I always get that wrong…), is important to keep tabs on, but keeping tabs on it can itself throw you off your stride. What to do? Well, as Merlin noted, you can set Mail.app to check your mail only every half-hour instead of every minute, which decreases the number of interruptions. This has proved a winning strategy around Chez Josh.
However, every half hour, when that Ding! sounds, my inner Pavlov’s dog can’t resist jumping for the little postage stamp in the dock, its tiny red badge shimmering with tantalizing promise… oh.
It’s a forward of that fark mockup of the supposed home computer by the RAND corporation, a rather tempting offer from a Nigerian national, some german right-wing screed, and an invoice from my hosting service. Nothing that needs a reply, I suppose… now, where was I?
If you’re easily distracted and over-stimulated, these interruptions can be a major source of trouble, as it’s difficult to recover from them. For that reason, I’ve started using a bit of software called Mail.appetizer, by Bronson Beta software. Although sadly incompatible with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, this little software gem has managed to deliver me from distraction on the mac for several months, now.
Its function is very simple: it displays a growl-like bezel in the corner of the screen, which displays the subject, sender, and content of whatever mail has just hit your inbox.
If you ignore it, it fades to the next message, and to the next, and to the next, and to the next, andand so forth. If, however, you see something you want to address immediately — like your boss or editor asking why your article is overdue, for example — then you can simply click the subject heading, which opens the offending message, to be replied to, forwarded, or agonized over.
That last bit of functionality is what really gets me excited about this king of application. “Ambient displays” get a certain amount of press, and in truth seem a rather good and necessary idea. This is due to the simple and important fact of human-computer interaction in the year 2005: The foreground of our attention is full. It follows that a good way to convey information is to put it in the periphery of our attention space, from where it can be brought to the foreground when needed.
The last bit turns out to be the rub. What separates the “amusing toy” from the “simple but brilliantly useful hack” is whether, once the ambient display has been noticed, I can immediately pull the full detail of the information available into the foreground of my attention.
Oh. The weather is bad? How bad?
Oh. Traffic on my blog just jumped? Where and how much?
A patient’s vital signs just dipped south? Whose? What happened?
A dial gauge on an old-fashioned medical instrument provides this level of detail on demand, as well as an ambient display; is it pointing generally upwards? Good. Way off to the left? Look closely. There, you get a reading to the whateverth degree that the dial can display. Right there, no extra effort needed.
I think this is the real opportunity for dashboard widgets in Mac OS 10.4, to create little ambient displays that have the capacity to reward attention with detail. Ever since seeing the first Konfabulator widget, I’ve wondered what it would take to hook up a little LCD and enough guts to have little off-computer widgets on my worktable, on the refrigerator, or on my corkboard. Does anyone know whether that’s something that could be built without breaking the bank?
Anyway, that’s the principle at work in Mail.appetizer, and for now it’s solved email for me. Found another ambient thingy that really works? Let me know in comments.
[Edit - spelling]