Over at Ars Technica, Peter Bright goes hands-on with WIndows 8 RTM (RTM? WTF?):

Because without those apps, the Windows 8 experience is incomplete. The design decisions Microsoft made have no rationale. We need an app ecosystem to give them context; to see whether Microsoft’s vision really plays out when used day-in, day-out, and whether Metro is a productive, fluent environment.

There’s also a question of hardware. Many OEMs are preparing to release a range of new machines with better, gesture-supporting trackpads, 10-point multitouch screens, lightweight tablets, and all manner of hybrids, but this “Designed for Windows 8” hardware isn’t out yet. Good trackpads with gesture support make a world of difference to the Windows 8 experience, but at the moment, driver and hardware availability is too limited.

What’s that Alan Kay? No, no. They haven’t gotten your memo from 1982 yet.

MoMA: Century of the Child
Great to see what’s possible with HTML & JS these days.
via @ryanquigley

Another bit worth mentioning from Siricusa’s Mountain Lion Review regarding how Apple handles (or doesn’t handle) messaging in the new Messages applicaiton (it replaced iChat):

The new interface combined with the new protocol leads to an experience that I found confusing. Send a message using the Messages application and a window may appear on one or more Mac screens, a notification dialog (and sound) may appear on iPads or iPod touches, and someone’s phone may vibrate in their pocket. Oops, did you just mean to send a message to your colleague down the hall as he sat at his Mac? Or did you mean to send a text to someone’s phone and not cause an alert to appear on his iPad which is currently being used by his child to play a game?

This is going to be a tough nut for Apple (and everyone else making mobile devices) to crack. Many of us are living in a multi iOS device world and can benefit greatly when all our devices are data- media- and message-synced. But only once we have said synchronization do we realize all the rules needed to make such a feature useful.
The same thing happened with the photostream in iCloud. When I first set it up, I thought, “Great! Now I have all my photos on all my devices.” I was only after living with photo synchronization did I realize I didn’t want every photo synced on every iOS device I own. Eventually, Apple added the ability to remove photos from Photostream on a per-device basis.
I see the same thing happening here, it’s all about Apple’s baby steps. Get to core functionality down, then slowing layer in added controls and customizations. In this case, mirror messaging across all devices on a particular iTunes account and once messaging is working give people the ability to control what devices get what messages and when.
Remember, when Apple introduces a feature, they want to get it right the first time, like copy-and-paste. I’m willing to bet they’ve already been working on mutli-device message synchronization. It’s just not ready for prime time yet.

Do me a favor. Make sure your wife’s (of girlfriend’s) iPhone has been synced and has an iCloud account associated with it. Right now. Do it.
I’m not saying this to sound like Don Draper. I’m saying this because most of women I know don’t sync their iPhones. Like my friend Frank, who texted me frantically this weekend because his baby daughter drooled all over his wife’s iPhone and then she plugged it in to charge it and it got ‘fried’.
Now the photos of their daughter’s first 6 months of life are gone.
Apple’s Genius Bar people said the only option they had left was to use a third party data recovery company to get their data back. Oh, and it would probably run them over $1,000 (*I told Frank to drop the iPhone into a container of dry rice. This helps suck out all the moisture from electronic devices and sometimes can save them from water (or drool) damage. It’s no guarantee but it’s worth trying.).
Some people are wary of iCloud. They’re wary of trusting all their data ‘in the cloud’. Frank’s wishing he had it right now.
Update: While you’re at it, you should also remind those non-techie friends of yours in finance to back up their iPhones too. And your Uncle Bob too.

At Ars Technica, Peter Bright has a review of Windows 8, and it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows:

Using the desktop with fingers is horrible in Windows 7, and it remains horrible in Windows 8. It will probably stay horrible until the end of time. It’s not a surprise to anyone that this is the case, and it’s precisely why we have the Metro interface and why Microsoft has stopped trying to get tablet users to use mouse-oriented interfaces. This isn’t just an issue with “legacy applications” or anything like that, either; even brand new interfaces, such as Explorer’s ribbon, do not work well with touch.

I take back my statement that the Microsoft Surface and Windows 8 are half-baked.
Microsoft’s vision for the future of computing is fully-baked, they just don’t know how to cook.
If you’re asking yourself why, go read the scathing article in this month’s Vanity Fair – Microsoft’s Lost Decade. When you see how they run things at that company, all this disfunction makes perfect sense.

I’m about one third of the way through John Siricusa’s 24-page tome of a review of OS X Mountain Lion.

As is expected from Hypercritical Man, he did a thorough job. He discovered the icon for Notes application “includes the partial text of the narration (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”) from Apple’s Think Different ad campaign” (Page 7 of his review):

If you’ve seen the Think Different commercial before, go watch it again. Still as powerful as when it debuted.

Some quick thoughts on the new Podcasts App for iPhone:

1. It’s extremely laggy on my iPhone 4. Sometimes when I click to download an episode from list within a podcast the app becomes unresponsive for over more than 5 seconds. For instance, when I’m in a list of episodes within a podcast, the list won’t scroll when I flick, and when I tap the ‘Podcasts’ or ‘Library’ button in the top left corner to go back to the previous list, it also won’t acknowledge my taps. I have to hit the Home button, and relaunch the app, at which point the app reflects whatever tap sequence I tried while it was frozen.

2. While the reel-to-reel is unnecessary, it doesn’t get in the way for me. I see it as designers at Apple having fun, and it’s clear a lot of work went into all the little details — watch the rocker arm wiggle when you hit the pause button.

3. The scrubber bar. What’s the deal with the needle thin red line you have to scrub the track with? Not only is it hard to see where you’re dragging, but it’s also another area with choppy responsiveness.

1. Elapsed/Remaining time labels – why is the type distorted? Look at the image above, It’s smushed. Nasty looking.

2. Radio dial interface for Top Stations. Again, I don’t mind the skeuomorphic dial they use, what I mind is how chuggy it is.

Update: While scrolling through Top Stations, the app froze, so I hit Home, but on every subsequent relaunch the app quit after a few seconds. The only way I could fix it was to delete the app and re-download it from the App Store. I like having a separate application for my podcasts. It’s particularly helpful when I’ve been listening to my music library on shuffle and then I decide to listen to a podcast.

Before, the Music app controlled playback of both music and podcasts, so there was no way for me to continue where I left off in my music shuffle playback. Now with two discreet apps, I can pick up where I left off on both music and podcasts.

Apple just really needs to resolve the performance issues in this app. I would like to think an application for audio download and playback doesn’t require a lot of processor power and/or system resources.

After howls of protest in the app store from users, Amazon walked back some of the changes it made to Kindle for iPad. Seen above are screenshots from an update Amazon released to the app store last week. The margins surrounding the text that had been eviscerated in the name of readability have been somewhat restored. However, the new, intrusive toolbar interface remains. The user reviews that the previous update had gotten are doubtless behind the changes, showing that companies do indeed respond to heavily negative feedback from customers.
In reading those customer reviews, there is nary a review that praised the narrow margins of last month’s update. So Amazon changed it. But there were also hardly any reviews that were critical of the toolbar, so Amazon left it as is. Make no mistake, the current toolbar is a downgrade compared to the previous iteration, but it was saved because the new margins were so atrocious that users completely missed the toolbar. Mediocrity is invisible when it stands next to hideousness. Next, Amazon is going to have to figure out how to keep the app from crashing.

Ever go to a ball game and forgot where you parked? Yeah, me too. Do you carry an iPhone? Want to know how to never lose your car again?

Here’s how:

1. Drive to destination – mall, sporting event, concert

2. Open Maps application on iPhone and tap bottom left button to locate yourself.

3. Tap bottom right button to reveal Map options and select Drop Pin and walk to your destination

4. When you’re ready to return to your car, open the Maps application again and click on the bottom left location button until the compass is enabled.

5. Walk in the direction of your Dropped Pin (your car) and never feel like a dumbass again

Based on the reviews in the App Store and the talk on Twitter, it looks like there’s a lot of people who agree with Bryan’s post from last week on the (updated) Kindle app reading experience.
If enough people make enough noise, things can change.
My money is on Amazon un-sucking their iPad app because this uproar.
People want a good reading experience, who knew?

Last week, Amazon updated it’s Kindle app for iOS. For the iPad, the new update is a case study in poor design. From the update blurb in the app store:

Improved reading experience on iPad: Smaller margins and a cleaner look help you focus on the author’s words.

When I first saw this in the blurb, I was immediately suspicious. It’s hard to overstate the importance of healthy margins and whitespace in good design. Generally, it’s also one of the earlier casualties when good design meets project managers and clients who aren’t designers. But I updated the app anyway. Upon opening, I saw what had been a decent treatment of margins had been destroyed by the redesign:

The image on the left is a screen capture from an iPad without the update installed (I’m a developer, I have more than one iPad. How first world of me.). The image on the right is with the update installed.

The smaller margins do indeed help a user focus on the words. In fact, that’s all a user can focus on. What Amazon has done is create a solid mass of text that has no breathing room. It’s claustrophobic. It’s stressed.

It’s like standing three feet in front of a brick wall and pretending you’re appreciating the architecture of a building.

The words are the most important aspect of a book. That’s intuitive. But, presentation is very important. Having ample margins helps the eye flow over the text and makes it easier to move from one line to the next while reading. Making the margins smaller in the app hinders the ease with which the eye can move over the page, making the book harder to read, not easier. Also, it’s just ugly.

There is also a usability gap that was created with the update. Previously, the app’s toolbar overlays would not interfere with the text on the page. Some people like to read with the toolbar visible. I’m not among them, but I respect that. After the update, keeping the toolbar visible is no longer a workable option:

Also, the new toolbar design has none of the nuance of the previous version. It’s black, bold, and in a user’s face. Even if it didn’t cover up text, the look and feel of the new toolbar is a downgrade.

The Kindle app in the iPad has been a conundrum ever since I began to use the device, simply because the presentation has always been suspect. The options for reading have been limited in ways I could never understand.

Continue…

After watching the WWDC Keynote, a few great things stood out to me:

• Unified Alerts and Notifications (like on iOS) which automatically disable when you plug into an external projector – for anyone who does presentations regularly, this resolves the distracting email and IM/Growl alerts that pop up
• Unified Search Field in Safari – Address Bar and Search Box have been combined
• iCloud Tabs – any web pages you have open on any of your other iCloud-connected devices are accessible from your desktop computer
• AirPlay Screen Sharing – so much better than connecting to crappy projectors with dongles

The greatest thing to see in OS X is the bleeding over of iOS features to the desktop environment in ways that make sense. This is the opposite of Microsoft, who’s abruptly moving their users to a completely new environment in Windows 8 (they even killed the Start Menu, even in their ‘classic mode’), Apple is taking little steps, year-by-year to merge the mobile and desktop operating systems.
Slow, careful iterations.
John Gruber pointed this out in a Macworld article he wrote in 2010:

This is how the designers and engineers at Apple roll: They roll.

They take something small, simple, and painstakingly well considered. They ruthlessly cut features to derive the absolute minimum core product they can start with. They polish those features to a shiny intensity. At an anticipated media event, Apple reveals this core product as its Next Big Thing, and explains–no, wait, it simply shows–how painstakingly thoughtful and well designed this core product is. The company releases the product for sale.

Then everyone goes back to Cupertino and rolls. As in, they start with a few tightly packed snowballs and then roll them in more snow to pick up mass until they’ve got a snowman. That’s how Apple builds its platforms. It’s a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement–so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time. Only in hindsight is it obvious just how remarkable Apple’s platform development process is.

Design isn’t just how it looks. It’s also not just a solution to a problem. Design is having a plan.

Michael Mace gives the good, the bad and the ugly on Windows 8 Preview in a very short 8,300+ word review.
Here’s one of many insightful conclusions Mace comes to:

Because of its problems, Windows 8 isn’t fun to use, at least for me. Whatever sense of joy I get from the cool new graphics is outweighed by a feeling that my productivity is being reduced. Think of the best new app or website you’ve ever discovered; the feeling you got the first time you understood the power of Twitter or you created a presentation and it came out looking great. That feeling of empowerment and excitement is critical to getting people started with a new technology. But Windows 8 makes makes me feel limited and cramped. It isn’t a launch pad, it’s a cage.

If Windows 8 is a problem for me, what’s it going to do to a typical Windows user who just wants to get work done and doesn’t have time to learn something new? And what sort of support burden is it going to put on the IT managers of the world?

It’s going to be very interesting to see how Windows 8 does when it hits virtual shelves.