Kindle for iOS, version 4.2 was released the other day. New features include easier access to the table of contents of books, and something called X-Ray Smart Look-Up. It’s a welcome addition, actually. But, has continuous scrolling, one feature that has been missing for years, been added yet?
No, it has not.

At Gizmodo, Brent Rose reviews the Samsung Gear Fit:

The software is unforgivably bad. Tragically bad. It feels as if the Gear Fit and the S Health teams barely spoke to each other at all. Which is especially bedeviling since Samsung made the conscious choice to sell a wearable product that only works with Samsung products. At least when Apple locks you into an ecosystem, things actually (mostly) work.

The Gear Fit’s pedometer is inaccurate, the exercise app doesn’t really integrate with S Health, and the sleep data doesn’t go anywhere at all. If you’re outside you need to turn the screen up to full brightness, but it will only stay in that mode for five minutes before reverting to medium brightness. Incredibly frustrating if you’re going for a run that lasts more than five minutes. Touchscreen controls tend to be very unresponsive, too.
This is what happens when Samsung doesn’t have Apple to copy from. They produce dog shit.
Nice work, Samsung.
[schadenfreude: a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people]

You like sliding app ‘cards’ up from the multitasking screen, don’t you?
You think you’re being smart quitting apps running the background, right?
Wrong, silly people. You’re making things worse:

By closing the app, you take the app out of the phone’s RAM . While you think this may be what you want to do, it’s not. When you open that same app again the next time you need it, your device has to load it back into memory all over again. All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your device than just leaving it alone. Plus, iOS closes apps automatically as it needs more memory, so you’re doing something your device is already doing for you. You are meant to be the user of your device, not the janitor.
Leave shit alone, ok?

Microsoft has been been saying since the beginning the advantage of Surface (coupled with Windows 8) is that it doesn’t compromise. It offers all the benefits of a tablet, with the productivity and power of a laptop.
Now Office is available for the iPad.
Microsoft has killed off its only supposed advantage and they can now discontinue the Surface, since the iPad has never had and never will have keyboard covers.
Case closed.

Zack Epstein is absolutely correct.
The best part of iOS 7 is the overall speed improvement. When I say it’s faster, I’m talking about motion transitions, time for apps to load, swipe-to-deletes in Mail, everything.
In reality each interaction is probably “only” fractions of a second faster, but you add them all up and it’s huge.

Unexpected 3-D with CSS. Pretty cool.
Say what you want about skeuomorphism being passé. Bullshit.
As someone noted recently (who’s blog post I’ve forgotten), Apple didn’t get rid of skeuomorphism at all in iOS 7—it’s layers and layers of UI behaving like semi-transparent/frosted glass, and the simulated physics of animations continue to be refined (like when you drag iMessages up and down with your finger).

Jesse James Garrett:

The interesting thing about galactic collisions is that because galaxies contain so much room between the stars, there’s very little actual colliding going on. The galaxies just sort of flow into one another, individual stars finding new places in the larger system developing around them in a process unfolding over billions of years. From the vantage point of someone living in one of these galaxies, even if you lived long enough to see the constellations shift and change around you, you still might not be aware of exactly what was going on.
A great metaphor for what’s happening with customer experience, service design and user experience design.

Benedict Evans (via DF):

This brings us back to the mouse and keyboard that you ‘need for real work’, as the phrase goes. Yes, you really do need them to make a financial model. And you need them to make an operating metrics summary — in Excel and Powerpoint. But is that, really, what you need to be doing to achieve the underlying business purpose? Very few people’s job is literally ‘make Excel files’. And what if you spend the other 90% of your time on the road meeting clients and replying to emails? Do you need a laptop, or a tablet? Do you need a tablet as well as a smartphone? Or a laptop, or phablet? Or both?
This is what Microsoft is trying to convince people with their Surface tablets—that you can’t do ‘real work’ on a ‘regular tablet’ (read: iPad), yet you can.
Ironically, consumer-focused Apple is dominating mobile device sales in the enterprise market.

I’m not surprised, but Samsung is integrating a fingerprint scanner (via The Loop) into their new phones—just like Touch ID Apple introduced last year in the iPhone 5s.
I lump Samsung in the same category as all the tacky, unoriginal people putting Flappy Bird clone apps in the app store and the vendors on Canal Street in Manhattan selling ripoff Louis Vuitton purses.
To be clear, the copying isn’t what bothers me. All artists copy. It’s the fact that they didn’t improve on what Apple introduced. Judging from the video, they actually made it worse.
It’s the difference between a talentless hack singing Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground at a karaoke bar and then hearing The Red Hot Chili Peppers do it. The former is copy, the latter a reinterpretation of the original.

Probability and chance often appear to be counterintuitive…Consider the following scenario:

John initially took a degree in mathematics, and followed it with a PhD in astrophysics. After that, he worked in the physics department of a university for a while but then found a job in the back room of an algorithmic trading company, developing highly sophisticated statistical models for predicting movements of the financial markets. In his spare time he attends science fiction conventions.

Now, which of the following do you think has the higher probability?

A. John is married with two children.
B. John is married with two children, and likes to spend his evenings tackling mathematical puzzles and playing computer games.

Many people answer B. In fact, the set of people described by the characteristics in B is a subset of those described by the characteristics in A: for John to have the characteristics of B, he has those of A and more. It follows that the probability that John is described by B cannot be larger than the probability that he’s described by A.

…This failure of intuition is often called the conjunction fallacy.

From The Improbability Principle by David J. Hand.
It’s a fascinating look into just how poor we human beings are at predicting outcomes. My favorite bits of the book are when Mr. Hand savages Carl Jung for casting a broad net over his personal coincidences as evidence for synchronicity. Sure, that’s low-hanging fruit these days, but still makes for good reading.

Matthaeus Krenn:

Several automotive companies have begun replacing traditional controls in their cars with touch screens. Unfortunately, their eagerness to set new trends in hardware, is not matched by their ambition to create innovative software experiences for these new input mechanisms. Instead of embracing new constraints and opportunities, they merely replicate old button layouts and shapes on these new, flat, glowing surfaces.

I’m understanding more and more why Android is a pile of visual design and user experience shit.
This font support is disgraceful.
And I’m not even asking for Android to support all the fonts Apple does. A simple, 10-year-old set of web fonts would suffice.
Georgia, Arial, Verdana and Times Roman, please?
Nope, that’s too much to ask from Google.
via DF

Steven Sinofsky, 11 August 2011 (my emphasis):

We started planning Windows 8 during the summer of 2009 (before Windows 7 shipped). From the start, our approach has been to reimagine Windows, and to be open to revisiting even the most basic elements of the user model, the platform and APIs, and the architectures we support. Our goal was a no compromise design.
The Verge, 30 January 2014 (again, my emphasis):
Microsoft is once again planning to alter the way its Start Screen works in Windows 8.1 Update 1. While the software giant originally released Windows 8.1 last year with an option to bypass the “Metro” interface at boot, sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the upcoming update for Windows 8.1 will enable this by default. Like many other changes in Update 1, we’re told the reason for the reversal is to improve the OS for keyboard and mouse users.
I don’t have a PhD in the English language or user interface design, but Windows 8 sounds like one big, fucking compromise.

Seamus Condron at PCMag.com is a longtime iPhone user and self-admitted Apple fanboy, but he decided to keep an open mind and test drive a Google Nexus.
It didn’t go well:

On a spec sheet, the Nexus 5’s HD display trumps the iPhone’s considerably. And don’t get me wrong, the Nexus screen is impressive, but I prefer my iPhone 5’s. For one, it seems some of the third-party app icons on the Nexus are degraded, which I venture to guess is the fault of the app makers. That said, the app design of some of my favorites seem considerably less elegant than on iOS 7 and fonts also look bigger than necessary. In the end, I think the uniformity of iOS 7’s interface design strongly influences how I feel about how things look on the screen. I may have come around on that if I had more time with the Nexus 5, but my first impression is usually the last.
Sounds consistent with my experiences using Android—although I know the “stock” Android experience is different than what I experienced on the Samsung Galaxy S3.
My disappointment with Android comes from thousands of tiny cuts.
There’s many little details they either weird or not right: crappy typography, hokey iconography, cheesy clocks to put on your home screen, weird 3-D transitions between home screen panels, blind adherence to the Android flush-top menu bar with apps, the weird back button, choppy UI transitions, clunky icon/text sizing in the status bar, a weird mis-mash of flat & textured/gradiented UI elements.
Using an Android device feels like driving a 2010-ish, base-model Toyota Corolla (or Honda Civic)—it has everything you need in a car, but there’s just no life to it. The interior is drab and generic, the handling is fair, acceleration is weak and everything feels flimsy and plastic.