Category Archives: Agile & Architecture

I  read a lot using the Kindle applications for Android and PC. While there’s a lot which is good about that process there are a number of things which really bug me. Some of these look incredibly simple to resolve, from my standpoint as a competent software developer, and I have to question whether Amazon actually care about getting the user experience right…

Changing Font Size

The current behaviour of the font selection option is completely brain-dead, especially when switching between documents. Suppose I open one book which has been composed using a large base font. The text comes up very large and I set my font size to 2. I then open a second book, which has been composed using a smaller base font, and I have to change the font setting to 4 to get back to a size I’m comfortable with. Open the first document and the text is now enormous!

The application should actually work as follows. I would set a preferred font face and size and that would just be used automatically for all the bulk text in all documents. Anything styled with style tags like normal,  body text,  list,  should just use my selected font and size. Automatically. Paragraphs with heading styles would use progressively larger fonts, and the style might change to an author preference, although I should be able to over-ride that.

If that’s not possible, although I really don’t understand why not, then any change I make to my settings should apply only for a single document, and my settings for each document should be remembered if I switch between them. If I have to set size 2 in one document and size 4 in another to get a consistent reading experience the app should remember that.

Have the developers ever actually used the devices and apps with real eBooks?

Collections and Tagging

When,  early on, you have half a dozen books in your Kindle account, the lack of effective library management tools is not too much of an issue. When, like us, that library has grown to several hundred titles this starts to be a major problem.

Amazon allege that the solution is to use collections. That might help, if it weren’t for another brain-dead implementation. Collections on the physical Kindle are a local data structure, effectively invisible to other devices. In the Android app they are quite a usable feature, and sync with other Android devices, but not other platforms. On the PC you can create local collections, and allegedly import collections from physical Kindles (although I haven’t got that to work) but the collections are then completely independent of all other devices.

Is this really the best that can be achieved by one of the leading cloud services companies? Surely it’s not rocket science to come up with an architecture for collections / lists and tags, which is synchronised with the cloud account from and to all devices on the account? (And I note that there can’t possibly be any real technical issue, because notes and highlights synchronise perfectly across all my devices…)

Again, this looks like the developers are either stupid, or lazy, or completely indifferent to the implications of their substandard work.

Book Descriptions

If you are reading a book on the Kindle, you can quickly pop up some key descriptive details. Relatively recently Amazon have supported the same feature in the Android app, although it doesn’t work for books which aren’t open. On the PC it’s not supported at all.

There are three sets of books for which I would like to be able to quickly access descriptive details, ideally on- and off-line:

• Books I have downloaded to my device, but which I’m not currently reading
• Books in my archive, to remember which is which
• Books which are being recommended by Amazon within my mobile reading experience, e.g. the recommendations panel on the home page of the Kindle app.

No, I do NOT want to "view in store", especially if it’s a book I’ve already downloaded and I’m just not 100% which is which from the cover image, and I’m offline. And I don’t really want to have to open up a book to see it’s description. Surely it wouldn’t be rocket science (again) to download the key descriptive details for all the books in the above categories at every sync, and have those details available via a long press from the overview pages just like they would be from within an open book?

Position References

Some books insist on referring internally by using a page number from the printed edition. If you’re referring to a specific position in a book in the outside world, this is also still a common practice (and probably the only viable one unless the book has quite a fine-grained and well-numbered heading structure). Kindle insists on referring to and navigating locations using an internal "position" reference, which not only has zero relationship to the outside world, but can change from time to time depending on font choice and other settings. Therefore unless you have access to the physical edition as well as the eBook, you’re stuffed. It’s not even easy if you have a relative reference (e.g. page 200 of 300), because you have to get the calculator out to work out that this is equivalent to "position 3400 of 5393".

It would undoubtedly be better if authors creating Kindle versions of technical and reference books made sure all internal references were simply hyperlinks to the right point in the document. However I’m sure Amazon could help as well. How about, for example, holding the page count of the physical edition(s) against the Kindle version, and modifying the "Go To" dialog so that I can specify the target position as a percentage, or as a page number relative to the page count for the physical edition?

The Back Button

The physical Kindle and all Android devices have a "back" button, which should take you back steadily through your work contexts, like the back button on a browser. On the Kindle, or the PC app, this behaves as you’d expect. If you follow a link within a book, then it takes you to a new page, but the back button takes you back to the page you were previously reading. Only when you get back to your first context does it take you right out to the menu. Not on Android. Click on a link to an external source, and the back button takes you back into Kindle at the right point. So far so good. Click on an internal link, and the back button takes you right out of the book. To make matters worse it has now remembered the location you navigated to as your "current" location, so to get back to where you were previously you have to navigate manually. Completely useless, and presumably about 1 line of code to fix properly.

Conclusions

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. Amazon make a vast amount of money out of the Kindle platform, and could make more if it is a sound platform for reference books as well as novels and the like. None of these issues would take a vast amount of effort to fix, just the will to be bothered and do a professional job. Amazon’s persistent indifference on these points reveals an attitude which bugs me even more than the issues themselves.

A little while back I was approached by EITA Global, a global provider of on-line training, and we have now agreed that I should present for them a webinar entitled "Agile Architects, and Agile Architecture". The current plan is for this run on 8th April. I’ll keep you all posted with any changes.

As part of my preparation, I decided to do a literature scan to see how this topic may have moved on since the last time I did some significant work on it, a couple of years ago. I have to say that based on my initial research I’m not that impressed… I don’t know whether to be flattered or slightly perturbed that AgileArchitect.org comes up squarely at the top of a Google search. There are a few decent web articles around, although most are several years old and I’d seen them before. The Google search also turns up several dead links.

Amazon turned up a couple of loosely-related books, and the most obvious candidate appeared to be "Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development" by James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bj�rnvig. I’ve now read a couple of chapters, but my first impression is not very favourable. I may be rushing to judgement, in which case I’ll apologise later, but the book seems to somehow equate "architecture" with "code structure" with "project structure", which isn’t right at all, missing a number of the most important dimensions of any true architecture.

This led me to ask myself a very basic question. "What do I mean by ‘Agile Architecture’?". In Coplien and Bj�rnvig’s book they seem to answer "an architecture which facilitates agile development". That may be one definition, but it isn’t mine.

I think the confusion arises from the difference between "agile" applied to a process (e.g. software development), and applied to a product. In the former case, the Agile Manifesto undoubtedly applies. In the latter, I’m not so sure. I think that for a product, and especially its architecture, the primary meaning of "agile" must be "able to respond to change". The larger the change which can be handled quickly and cheaply, the more agile the architecture. An architecture which has been built in a beautifully run agile project but which needs new code the first time a business rule changes is fragile, not agile. The system which can absorb major changes in the business rules without a single line of code is genuinely agile. The integration architecture which allows multi-million pound system A to be upgraded with no impact on adjacent multi-million pound system B, or which allows the company to be restructured just by re-configuring its services, is the most agile of all.

I’m slightly worried that "agile" may have become a "reserved word", and this "architecture in the large" definition may run counter to accepted practice. Is that right, or am I reading too much into a few examples?

Or Have Microsoft Lost Their Mojo?

I like colour. I see in colour, dream in colour and have a rich colour vocabulary which drives much of my photographic style (see Seeing in Black and White). It’s also an important part of how I work – colour can be a powerful “dimension” in the visualisation of information. The human eye and brain are remarkably good at processing and using colour signals, whether it’s a highlighted line of text on screen, or a flashing blue light in traffic.

Now I acknowledge that this isn’t universal. As a designer you have to cater for a significant proportion of users (about 8% of males) who have poorer colour vision, and especially in mobile systems there will be times when ambient lighting conditions reduce effective colour saturation to a point where it doesn’t work. The traditional way to deal with this is to combine colour with another signal, such as shape – green tick vs red cross, for example. Then each user can use the signal which works best for them.

Microsoft used to get this. Their software was frequently a model of usability, and exploited colour, shape and shading to both guide the user, and allow the user to better manage their data. Icons could be rapidly located by colour as much as by detail. Data items of a particular status would “leap out” from a forest of those without the status marking. Office 2003 introduced follow-up flags for both OneNote and Outlook, which proved to be a great way to identify and retrieve key items in large lists. These supported both colour and shape or text as “identifying dimensions”.

Then sometime in the late noughties, Microsoft lost their way. Office 2010 has abandoned colour as a navigational tool. Tools, icons and the dividers between sections of the screen are all subtle shades or pale pastels, making them very difficult to visually distinguish, particularly in poor lighting conditions. Icons are no longer clearly distinguishable. However the worst regression is in respect of Outlook’s follow-up flags, which now actively disable the use of colour via a tyranically imposed colour scheme consisting of “multiple shades of puce”, rendering them completely useless for their original purpose.

This rant had been brewing for some time as I try to get to grips with Office 2010 and its inexplicable abandonment of many well-established user interface standards at the cost of enormous frustration for long-standing users. What tipped me over the edge was the announcement last week of Microsoft’s new Windows logo. Gone are the cheerful primary colours, and the careful shading which made later versions pop out of the screen with real depth. In their place is a plain white cross on a muddy blue background. Useless!

Now I suppose there might be people who think that this reduced colour palette is somehow “cool” or “elegant”. They’re probably the same group who think that it’s appropriate to model fashion on anorexic teenagers rather than real women. In both cases they’ve clearly lost track of who their real customers are, who has to get real utility from their work.

I’m not against change, and I accept that high-resolution graphics allows more subtle designs that we were previously used to. However, this rush to abandon colour in user interfaces and branding robs us of an important dimension. We absolutely do have to make sure that designs are also usable for users and in conditions where colour may not work, but we must not throw away or disable powerful tools which have real value to the majority of us. Microsoft should know better.