deliberately radical without regard for traditions

Timm Romine responding to Sean Geraghty’s criticisms that Apple has thrown out discoverability and usability in their products:

Sorry, Sean, and Don, and Bruce, but The Future won’t have buttons whose functions can be achieved without buttons, and it definitely won’t look like iOS 6. And you can argue it won’t look like iOS 7–9. But what’s certain, is the future of UI is minimalistic, sleek, simplistic — according to the sci-fi movies we revere.

Back in 2009 I wrote about the future of iconography. I speculated then—and Siri is now showing us now— that the interface of the future is no interface (I’m not suggesting I’m a genius, the writing was on the wall).

Just like learning any new language, learning the language of an interface takes varying degrees and practice before one is accustomed to it.

I’ve been maintaining this blog since 2006 so I’m used to the endless stream of doom-and-gloom pieces on Apple.

We, and Apple, are going to be ok.

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Move to iOS App for Android

Jacob Kastrenakes on the “reviews” of Apple’s ‘Move to iOS’ app for Android in the Google Play Store:

“I call on my fellow Android comrades to ensure this app gets drowned into oblivion with a 1-star rating never to be seen again on our cherished platform,” writes reviewer Segun Omojokun. And that’s basically what’s happening. The app primarily has 5-star and 1-star reviews right now, with the vast majority being the latter. There are currently a little over 800 reviews with a 5 star rating and over 3,300 reviews with a 1-star rating. The app’s overall rating currently sits at a 1.8.

We always hear about Apple fanbois, but shit, there are a lot of Android turds out there.

Categories:

Product, Pyschology

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Android Defectors

That’s where the switching number comes into the picture. This Scenario 2 is shown in the figure above and suggests that although Android gained 8 million new users, it lost 6.4 million to iPhone for a net gain of 1.6.

Apple may have also lost a few users to Android but overall gained switchers from other platforms, mainly Android. This is what would support Tim Cook’s comments.

Thinking further ahead, as the markets mature globally, they may well evolve into the way the US market evolves today. Apple’s brand promise ensures loyalty while competing platforms slowly “leak” users. If this sounds eerily familiar then you’d be right. This is exactly how the PC market behaves today.

The new switchers, Horace Dediu

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Technology

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Apple Music, First Impressions

I’ve been using Apple Music since it launched yesterday. It’s interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll be signing up after the 3-month trial is over, but so far I like the recommendations it gives me.

The playlists under “For You” are good, but I’ve been playing around with the ability to create a “station” based on a track I’m listening too. I want recommendations based on my music library. So far, the stations Apple has been creating are good. I noticed it will play me a combination of songs already in my library and songs from iTunes.

The user interface on my iPhone is on the complex side. I can figure it out without too much trouble, but I’m not sure non-nerds will be able to. Part of this is due to the density of functionality Apple has packed into the Music app. There’s a lot going on.

I used to be able to double-tap on the album artwork to display the album track list, but that doesn’t work anymore. I have to hit the 3 dots in the bottom right of my iPhone and then tap on the track/album/artist at the top of the modal menu. Weird. Confusing.

When I go to My Music and switch to ‘Songs’ I no longer have a ‘Shuffle’ button at the top of the list. I miss that button. I’ll probably get over it.

I also no longer have the ability to reorganize the bottom menu. Right now ‘My Music’ is the last button. Apple is assuming I’m always going to want their streaming service to be my first priority. I’d like ‘My Music’ to be the first menu item. Please.

iTunes is a whole other story. It continues the long tradition of being a labyrinthine, confusing desktop application. As with the iOS Music app, I can figure it out, I just wonder how many regular people can. Since iOS is where all the money and consumer eyes are these days, it’s not the end of the world.

Now back to my music.

Categories:

Human Experience

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Oh Es Ex

Jason Snell thinks it’s time to retire OS X:

They’re going to collide eventually. iOS is on track for version 9 this year, and if Apple continues incrementing OS X versions, we’ll be heading for 10.11. And, again barring any change in philosophy, in the summer of 2016 we’ll be talking about iOS 10 and OS X and things will get weird.

But this is an era where Apple appears to be amenable to change on many fronts. Tacking the lowercase letter i on the front of product names appears to be a thing of the past—hello, Apple Watch. (And while it would be bold for Apple to change the name of iOS to Apple OS, I can’t see it—it’s powering the iPhone and iPad, and those names aren’t changing anytime soon.)

So let me make a proposal. As long as Apple is showing a willingness to change, let’s get off 10 and take this one to eleven.

Makes sense to me.

via 512 Pixels

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Technology

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“Don’t bother learning our platform or writing native apps for it.”

A few weeks ago I linked up to the story about Microsoft giving developers the ability to port Android and iOS apps to Windows.

At Ars Technica, Sean Gallager gets into more of the nerdy details and recalls IBM and Blackberry trying similar, unsuccessful moves:

Neither OS/2 nor BlackBerry 10 has made a success of this capability. There are two major problems with supporting foreign applications on a niche platform. The first is straightforward: it removes any incentive for developers to bother with the native platform. Investing in developing for a minor platform is already something of a gamble, and by telling developers “Oh hey, you can just use your existing Win16 or Android program…” as IBM and BlackBerry (respectively) did, you’re implicitly sending them a message. “Don’t bother learning our platform or writing native apps for it.”

And:

Even with Islandwood, porting iOS applications to Windows will require more work than Android apps require. While some Android apps will be 100 percent compatible with Astoria, that won’t be the case with Islandwood. There are differences between the platforms that need handling—Android and Windows Phone have a back button, for example, whereas iOS doesn’t—and devs will have to change code accordingly.

The impact this has will depend on the app. King’s Candy Crush Saga for Windows Phone is already using Islandwood, and the changes required were described as a “few percent.” CCS supports features including in-app purchases in its Windows Phone version, taking advantage of the StoreKit API mapping. However, as a game, its user interface is largely custom anyway. Apps that lean more heavily on UIKit may well need more work to ensure that their interfaces meet the expectations of Windows users.

It’s Microsoft’s last ditch effort.

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Technology

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This Should Go Fine

At BGR.com, Brad Reed on Microsoft’s plans to let you port iOS and Android apps to Windows:

Microsoft is raising the white flag when it comes to developing its own mobile app ecosystem — instead, it’s going to let developers easily bring their iOS and Android apps over to Windows 10 without having to completely rebuild them from the ground up as they’ve had to do in the past. Essentially, Microsoft is letting developers reuse most of the same code that they used to write their apps for rival platforms and is giving them tools to help them optimize these apps for Windows.

Wow! Sounds tremendous. I’m sure there won’t be any redesigning needed. I mean, it’s not like Apple or Google have their own design guidelines, like this and this.

I’m also sure performance will be lickity-split. No lag or recoding needed.

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Uncategorized

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I am in charge of my device, my device is not in charge of me.

Steven Levy on the problem with his ever-increasing notifications:

But it’s hard to do this right when every single app wants to send you notifications. Even given that the system will limit itself to notices worthy of instant notice – and The Melvin Renaming is evidence to the contrary – there are just too many notifications elbowing their way into what should be a narrow passage labeled, “Stuff I absolutely need to see.”

This decreases the value of all notifications. If you want an example of another realm, consider the situation of “alarm fatigue” in hospitals, as recently exposed in a book by Dr. Robert Wachter, excerpted here on Backchannel recently. Of the 350,000 drug prescriptions a month that Wachter’s hospital issues, pharmacists get alerts on nearly half of those. In the hospital’s five Intensive Care Units, bedside cardiac units alerts go off 187 times – per patient, per day. That’s 381,560 a month. If you weren’t inured, you’d go crazy. But what about the really serious ones?

We aren’t at that level of desperation yet with online notifications. But the Age of Notifications is about to face its biggest mess yet, as alerts move from phone screens to watch faces. Notifications are just about the entire point of a smart watch – you’re not going to be reading books, watching movies or doing spreadsheets on them. And a tilt of the wrist is the perfect delivery system for those little blips.

I say these are his ever-increasing notifications because I don’t have this problem. Because I turn off most notifications on my iPhone. The only time my phone vibrates is when I receive a phone call. You know, that old-timey medium were you hear a voice and you talk into your device and they can hear you.

I understand I’m an outlier in how I handle my notifications, but I still don’t have any sympathy for these self-made “victims” of notifications. I am in charge of my device, my device is not in charge of me. As George Carlin said, I have this real moron thing I do, it’s called thinking. When I install a new app, and that app asks permission to send me notifications, I think for a minute if really makes sense for Flappy Bird or Instagram to send me notifications. The answer is usually no.

I have some advice for anyone who feels their device is running and ruining his or her life:

  • Delete Facebook from your device

Now those hours you’d normally be wasting following the lives of other people? Use a small fraction of that time in the settings area of your iPhone or Android phone. Familiarize yourself with how notifications are handled and turn off the unimportant ones.

I’m normally a big fan of Steven Levy, but shame on him for writing that piece.

Categories:

Human Experience

Disinformation Around Background Processes On iOS

My father got an iPhone 5 this past Christmas. I know he’ll enjoy using it.

How do I know this?

This is usually what happens when my wife and I go back to Jersey to visit my parents:

Me: [lays iPhone on kitchen counter]

Dad: [picks up my iPhone, starts messing with it]

Me: Dad, what are you doing?

Dad: Ha, I figured out your passcode, 1111.

Me: Congratulations, Dad.

Dad: [Continues to swipe and tap around, eventually puts it down]

Dad: Ha, neat stuff.

My dad’s an engineer so by his nature he’s a tinkerer. I know what you’re thinking and no, he hasn’t tried to take his iPhone apart to understand how it works. He knows a lot about computers and technology and he took the time a few weeks ago while I was on the phone with him to “enlighten” me on a “trick” he learned on his iPhone. I was intrigued.

Dad: So Mikey, you got your iPhone handy? Do this: Go to your Home screen. Okay? Now double-click the Home button. Ok, you see all those apps? Now tap and hold on one until they all start shaking. Now you can kill apps that are running in the background and draining your battery.

Mike: Dad, who the hell told you to do this?

Dad: The guys in my IT department recommended I install a task killer app on the Galaxy S3 they gave me. They said these task killer apps let you quit apps running in the background that are draining your battery. Once I discovered this [App Switcher] on my iPhone I figured it worked like the task killer app on my Galaxy.

Mike: No, no, no, Dad. No, you don’t need to do this on iOS. The operating system handles on this for you. And so began the re-education of my father on how background processes work on iOS. I explained to him the App Switcher tray can be thought of as a history of apps you’ve used. It’s not showing you everything running in the background. I explained to him, sure, he might only have 5 items total in his App Switcher, but I have over a dozen in mine. This does not mean over a dozen apps are running in the background on my iPhone.

He understood things after our conversation, but it makes me wonder how many other people are misinformed about how iOS handles resource management?

A few weeks after our conversation, he sent me this scan of a magazine my mother bought him called iPhone Life:

iPhone-Life-Mag-Jan-Feb-2013.gif It’s a bit hard to read, but #2 says:

Shut down background apps. Double-tap the home button to bring up the multitasking bar with the recently used apps. Tap and hold any app icon until it starts wiggling, then close it by tapping the little red button on the top left of the app icon. Sometimes these apps consume power even if they are not being used (especially Location Services).

Now this battery saving advice isn’t 100% false. Apps using Location Services can be a drain on your battery even if they’re not being used. For instance, I love the app Dark Sky. Its key feature is it can tell you, almost down to the minute, when it will start raining where you are. In order to be so accurate, it has to track your location via GPS, regardless of whether you’ve launched the app or not. This eats up some some system resources. Dark Sky is the exception though, not the norm.

Reading through Apple’s Developer site can shed some much-needed light on this whole background process issue. On the page titled, App States and Multitasking, Table 3-1 lists the five states an app can be in: Not Running, Inactive, Active, Background and Suspended.

Let’s look at what “Suspended” is:

The app is in the background but is not executing code. The system moves apps to this state automatically and does not notify them before doing so. While suspended, an app remains in memory but does not execute any code.

When a low-memory condition occurs, the system may purge suspended apps without notice to make more space for the foreground app.

Farther down the page, under the heading, Moving to the Background:

When the user presses the Home button, presses the Sleep/Wake button, or the system launches another app, the foreground app transitions to the inactive state and then to the background state. These transitions result in calls to the app delegate’s applicationWillResignActive: and applicationDidEnterBackground: methods, as shown in Figure 3-5. After returning from the applicationDidEnterBackground: method, most apps move to the suspended state shortly afterward. Apps that request specific background tasks (such as playing music) or that request a little extra execution time from the system may continue to run for a while longer.

To be clear: all apps immediately transition to the inactive state once a user presses the Home button, presses the Sleep/Wake button, or the system launches another app and then they move right to the suspended state unless they request specific background tasks.

This highlights one of the most important differences between “open” platforms like Android and curated ones like iOS. In addition to controlling background processes on iOS, Apple also requires every developer put their app through an approval process where Apple checks for things like unnecessary background processes or malicious, [back doors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing).

On Android, there are no approval processes if you decide to publish your app outside Google Play. If you want to make an Android app, you just do it. This sounds great, but it requires things like task killers to quit resource-hogging apps.

To me, this defeats the purpose of a smartphone.

What can Apple do to dispel the misconception that all the apps in your Task Switcher are running and draining your battery?