Apple’s “trademarked” chat bubbles: source equivocality in mobile apps and services
TechCrunch and others have been joking about Apple’s rejection of an app because it uses shiny chat bubbles, which the Apple representative claimed were trademarked:
Chess Wars was being rejected after the six week wait [because] the bubbles in its chat rooms are too shiny, and Apple has trademarked that bubbly design. […] The representative said Stump needed to make the bubbles “less shiny” and also helpfully suggested that he make the bubbles square, just to be sure.
One thing that is quite striking in this situation is that it is at odds with Apple’s long history of strongly encouraging third-party developers to follow many UI guidelines — guidelines that when followed make third-party apps blend in like they’re native.1
It’s important to not read too much into this (especially since we don’t know what Apple’s more considered policy on this will end up being), but it is interesting to think about how responsibility gets spread around among mobile applications, services, and devices — and how this may be different than existing models on the desktop.My sense is that experienced desktop computer users understand at least the most important ways sources of their good and bad experiences are distinguished. For example, “locomotion” is a central metaphor in using the Web, as opposed to the conversation and manipulation metaphors of the command line / natural language interfaces and WIMP: we “go to” a site (see this interview with Terry Winograd, full .mov here). The locomotion metaphor helps people distinguish what my computer is contributing and what some distant, third-party “site” is contributing.
This is complex even on the Web, but many of these genre rules are currently being all mixed up. Google has Gmail running in your browser but on your computer. Cameraphones are recognizing objects you point them at — some by analyzing the image on the device and some by sending the device to a server to be analyzed.
This issue is sometimes identified by academics as one of source orientation and source equivocality. Though there has been some great research in this area, there is a lot we don’t know and the field is in flux: people’s beliefs about systems are changing and the important technologies and genres are still emerging.
If there’s one important place to start thinking about the craziness of the current situation of ubiquitous source equivocality is “Personalization of mass media and the growth of pseudo-community” (1987) by James Beniger that predates much of the tech at issue.
- I was led to think this by a commenter on TechCrunch, Dan Grossman, pointing out this long history. [↩]