Category Archives: Apple

iOS 7 Thins Out

Was there a lot that was terribly wrong with the look and feel of iOS 6? Not in my book. It certainly wasn’t perfect, and many swaths of it were begging for some kind of house cleaning, but it didn’t need to be chucked away entirely. Apple decided to do just that, though, in their just announced iOS 7. The new operating system is significantly less ornamental than its predecessor; if you can call something “more minimal,” then iOS 7 looks to be just that. It’s simpler, less cluttered, and decidedly flatter, as folks like to say.

It’s also more like the cosmetics counter at your local department store than ever before, because, apparently, it makes liberal use of the thin or ultra light weights of Helvetica Neue throughout its many revamped interfaces.

Historically, these fonts have figured prominently into the typographic vocabulary of the beauty and fashion industries, where they’ve been used for years to connote notions of modernity, Euro-centric sophistication and near-anorexic thinness. They facilitate aspirational marketing messages, ideals that consumers can aspire to by applying that perfect shade of lipstick or putting on that perfect summer dress. And more often than not they’ve also been meant to indicate femininity.

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Hoping Apple Puts Family First

I’m not sure what Apple will announce at its 2013 WWDC Keynote later today, but I suspect the thing at the top of my list is probably not at the top of theirs: significantly more robust multi-user account support throughout iOS.

This is a need that has been sorely felt for some time. To describe it in more detail, I’d break it down into two parts.

First: allow more than one user to login to an iOS device — if not iPhones, which are admittedly intensely personal, then iPads, which are heavily shared devices. Two years ago I called iPads “post-personal computers,” because I saw that they were being readily passed around within households. Since then, I’ve only come to see more of that kind of real world usage. Adding support for those use cases strikes me as not only necessary, but also an opportunity for Apple to gain a meaningful competitive edge over other mobile platforms, which still think in terms of user accounts and not in terms of real usage patterns.

The second part is: allow users to combine their Apple IDs. This is something that I also happened to write about two years ago in a post titled “Multiple User Account Disorder,” and the situation remains unimproved. The gist of it is that people inadvertently create multiple Apple IDs all the time, then find themselves needing to combine them — but Apple has no facility to make that happen, even if you call tech support and elevate your predicament to the highest-ranking and most sympathetic support supervisor you can find. Fixing this problem will relieve untold confusion for many, many users, especially those who are less adept at negotiating the technicalities of having multiple accounts.

I complain that these two elements have not budged much in two years, but that’s not entirely true. In the second half of last year, Apple shipped a modest update to its Apple TV software, which ostensibly runs on iOS, that allows a family to add more than one Apple ID to that device. It’s a bit kludgy, because it requires that users trudge back to the Apple TV’s settings each time they want to switch to a different ID, but I’m hoping it’s a start.

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Magic and Mobile Apps

Apple long ago abandoned its original “Magical and Revolutionary” tagline for the iPad, probably out of some embarrassment at how the word ‘magical’ made so many of us groan. But the more I use, build and learn about touch-based software, the more I think magic is really a key component of this stuff, even if it’s not exclusive to the iPad.

I thought about this recently when a co-worker introduced me to Moves, an iPhone app that tracks the number of steps you take, with the aim of getting you to be more physically active from day to day. Once downloaded, you use Moves by doing… well, almost nothing. The app does everything for you, recording and parsing out your steps by mapping where you’ve traveled over the course of the day, how far and how fast, all with no user intervention required. All you have to do is the walking part, and the app quite literally does the rest, generating a complete, metered itinerary for all the walking and (most of) the places you visited in a given day.

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The New Yorker in Your Pocket

Much to my surprise, I’ve become a regular user of my Kindle Fire. I never expected that to be the case, since I was so unimpressed with it at its debut. But when I realized that I was toting it along with me just about every day, I also realized that the only app I ever used on it was the tablet version of The New Yorker. If you’re a devoted reader of that magazine and you ride the New York City subway, you’d probably agree with me that it’s much easier to read it on the smaller, more easily gripped Kindle Fire than it is on an iPad, especially on the always-crowded L train.

For some reason, Condé Nast decided that creating a full-text iPhone version of The New Yorker app was not a priority. Until now. As of this week, there’s a brand new iPhone version available as part of iOS’ Newsstand. Each print issue is now available in full, delivered automatically on Monday.

This probably puts an end to the Fire’s usefulness for me. Unlike plenty of others, I actually enjoy reading on my phone. Having a phone with me at more or less all times is a huge advantage over the additional screen real estate that a tablet — 7-inches or otherwise — affords.

So a new iPhone version of The New Yorker would have to be really bad for me to not want to use it. The bar is very, very low, I should say.

Luckily, the app clears that bar. I’m not sure how much further above the bar it rises just yet, but the app does work. Which is to say, it seems to carry over many of benefits as well as many of the problems that its iPad and Fire versions have.

To list a few of the problems: on my admittedly aging iPhone 4, I see a lot of progress spinners as the app desperately tries to load pages while I swipe from article to article. It just shouldn’t be necessary to wait for text as much as Condé Nast’s apps ask us to wait for text, not in this day and age. And the app’s insistence on pagination — and vertical pagination, at that — instead of natural scrolling is typical print-centric fussiness; the byproduct of this is that some articles ask users to page through as many as forty or fifty screens. Pagination, along with the inability to resize the font size for your own comfort, is probably required to preserve the app’s exquisite typography. It seems particularly cruel to disallow font resizing on a phone app, especially one whose main purpose is to read, but hey this is Condé Nast, so we take what we can get.

On the plus side, the app offers all the fantastic content of each issue of The New Yorker, finally available in a convenient, mobile form — finally! That’s a win, in my book. Also, I can now ditch my Kindle Fire.

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Follow Up to “Built to Not Last”

The response to my post yesterday about the durability of Apple’s products has been much more robust than I expected.

A lot of people have challenged me to name at least a few modern electronic devices that age well in the manner I’m describing. I admit: it’s very difficult to do that. Many people have cited Moore’s Law, the principle that guides every digital product’s life cycle, as being so thoroughly in opposition to designing and building products that last that it renders my argument inherently flawed. You just can’t build digital devices for the long haul, they say, because “planned obsolesence” will always do these devices in, make them irrelevant even if they do survive the ravages of time.

This is true to some extent. As I said above, I’m certainly not advising Apple on a purely business level that it would be a good idea to reverse course and make new devices user-upgradeable and repairable.

But I would say that just because these devices might no longer be wanted in their eighth, ninth, tenth years of their lives and so on, that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to build them more ruggedly, and it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t be built so that they acquire an emotionally appealing patina as they age, increasing their desirability if only to a select few.

There’s very little keeping Apple from making an iPod or iPhone or iPad that would last for a decade or more, even if to do so would mean its software could no longer be practically updated at some point (in fact that already happens, which is totally fair, but almost invariably, the hardware begins to break down at that point too). And there’s very little keeping Apple from engineering their devices in such a way that they get better looking over time. Their margins are certainly healthy enough to impose this kind of challenge upon themselves.

It’s true, there’s not necessarily a business case to do this, but that is not the only thing Apple will be judged on in the decades to come. And that’s what I’m talking about here: how will future generations look back at Apple, and by extension its customers? Did we all live our lives by more than just the bottom line? Or were the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the decades in which we irrevocably decided that everything should be disposable (or even recyclable) after just two or three years?

It may sound like I’m picking on Apple, but I think that’s a specious criticism, too. Apple regularly claims exceptionalism in the kinds of products they build; it’s fair game then to at least raise the issue of doing things their peers clearly won’t. This is the brand they built: a company that makes truly great products, products that make a dent in the universe. To me, doing even a little bit to counter the notion that everything is disposable is right in line with that.

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Built to Not Last

Not long after its announcement last week, Kyle Wiens of iFixIt disassembled one of Apple’s new Retina MacBook Pros and wrote at Wired.com that “the display is fused to the glass, which means replacing the LCD requires buying an expensive display assembly. The RAM is now soldered to the logic board — making future memory upgrades impossible. And the battery is glued to the case.” His conclusion was that it’s “the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart.”

This has sparked some debate on both the customer friendliness and environmental responsibility of this kind of manufacturing, There’s no denying that the Retina MacBook Pro is clearly not built for user-serviceable repair or upgrade. Obviously, it follows the same path that Apple has taken with its products over the past decade-plus; from the iPod to the iPhone to the MacBook Air to the iPad, Apple hardware has become less and less accessible over time.

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Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs Screenplay Will Be Highly Inaccurate and That’s Okay

Aaron Sorkin’s script for “The Social Network” won him an Oscar, but it drew the ire of at least a few tech pundits who felt that it took too many liberties for dramatic effect. Now Sorkin is writing a screenplay about Steve Jobs. In an interview with The New York Times last week, here’s what he had to say about his thinking on the project.

“At the moment I’m at roughly the same place I was when I decided to write “The Social Network” — which is to say I don’t know what the movie’s about yet. I know it won’t be a biography as it’s very hard to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biopic. I know that Jobs was a very complicated and dynamic genius who fought a number of dramatic battles. I know that like Edison, Marconi (and Philo Farnsworth), he invented something we love. I think that has a lot to do with our love affair with him. We’re told every day that America’s future is basically in service but our history is in building things — railroads and cars and cities — but Steve Jobs, in building something that’s taking us to our future, has also taken us to one of the best parts of our past. Now all I have to do is turn that into three acts with an intention, obstacle, exposition, inciting action, reversal, climax and denouement and make it funny and emotional and I’ll be in business.”

What’s interesting to me about these early thoughts is that they make no mention of historical accuracy. Instead, they’re focused on teasing out the dramatic core of Jobs’ story. Sorkin is looking to understand the idea of Steve Jobs, rather than the person himself.

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Talking Apple Heads

Apple had a pretty big slate of announcements at today’s World Wide Developers Conference Keynote. For me, the hardware products and software features that debuted today are evidence that the Tim Cook-led Apple is not missing a beat; everything looks great.

Except for one thing: Apple’s product videos remain trapped in time, following the same format that their videos from the last decade followed: talking head shots of Apple executives as they wax effusively about whatever new product they’re introducing.

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Photo Permissions on iOS

Any time an iOS app wants to give you access to your own photos, it must first ask you for permission to do so. This is understandable, because you don’t want just any app you download to be able to have its way with your photo library. But the way that the operating system asks for permission is problematic.

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Get on the Bjango Wagon

Marc Edwards over at Bjango is an extremely knowledgable and talented app designer and developer. If you make apps and you’re not reading his blog, you’re missing out on a great education. Last year he wrote a phenomenally helpful article on “pixel-perfect vector nudging” in Photoshop that was probably the single most useful tip I read anywhere in 2011. These articles are free, but I’d pay real money for them, just as I paid for his excellent Skala Preview, a Mac OS X desktop application and iOS app that lets you send real-time previews of your Photoshop work to your iPad or iPhone. It’s simple, elegant and awesome. This morning he also updated his shockingly comprehensive iOS Photoshop Actions and Workflows to version 1.2, with some minor tweaks and support for Photoshop CS6 (already!). In short, Marc is making incredible contributions to the field; give him a bit of your attention and, if Skala Preview strikes your fancy, a bit of your money. You’ll be well rewarded.

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