five years
January 10, 2012 - 1:37am — andrewThe iPhone was announced publicly five years ago today in an event so mesmerizing to my then-treo-wielding self that I spent a good part of the afternoon making a life size papercraft version using all the (scant) information available at the time, just so I could feel what it was going to be like to hold the thing, to get a sense of just how huge and beautiful that touch screen would be.
Over at SplatF, Dan Frommer points to a quote from Steve Jobs during the presentation:
“Now, software on mobile phones is like baby software. It’s not so powerful. And today, we’re going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at least 5 years ahead of what’s on any other phone. Now, how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong foundation: iPhone runs OS X.” [Applause.]
Frommer goes on to question how true this five-year advantage has been, concluding that the software gap has largely been bridged, save for a few remaining differentiators:
If anything, where Apple is the most ahead of Android today — perhaps even 5 years ahead — is on the business and customer experience sides.
Apple still seems to have the power in its relationships with carriers, demanding a clean user experience (no pre-installed crap), control over software updates and the length of its update path, a mostly-reliable App Store that makes a lot of money in app sales for developers, distribution through its own retail stores, tight integration with Macs and the iPad, and great devices at great prices. Not to mention an extremely profitable business model — selling tens of millions of iPhones per year for a big profit. These things seem to be more iffy in the Android camp.
Like Gruber, I'll allow that these are the areas where it's most obvious to nearly anyone that Apple remains ahead. But I think there are two areas where the thinking behind iOS is still clearly ahead of the design decisions underlying competing efforts these last five years.
Gruber has the first one - the primacy of user interface responsiveness over other concerns:
I’m not saying the original 2007 iPhone is a better overall device today than the Lumia or Galaxy. It has very little RAM and a much slower processor and you can feel it. But there are aspects of the original iPhone software, animation, scrolling, touch-tracking, that remain superior to any competition. Was everything about the original iPhone five years ahead of the competition? No, no way — especially in terms of hardware. But some aspects of its software were more than five years ahead.
The second bit of thinking that has proved to be as far ahead of its time is the decision to put as much of the interface as possible in software, through the touch screen, rather than hardware. Recall that Android was originally conceived in the heyday or blackberry and so was destined originally for that keyboard-phone scheme with tons of buttons below an interaction-abstracted screen. Even with the benefit of Apple's example, the first Android phones only looked vaguely like the now-ubiquitous screen-dominant phone - and most had a keyboard hiding under there anyway. Five years later and Android is only now going to a buttonless device paradigm, and even that replaces legacy hardware buttons with software buttons below most of the interface.
Apple's software decisions before 2007 allowed the iPhone to be a truly app-centric device in a way no other platform had been before - no interface presents itself to the user aside from what is necessary to the task at hand, and all functions the user might access must be rendered on screen rather than hidden in some unlabeled or mislabeled static button. Further, the user can expect action to be met almost instantly by some sensory feedback, so there is no question that the intent of the user has been some way received. I think these two insights are among the most important in the design of what has become iOS, and are the key pieces that make it so approachable to the many who are becoming acquainted with computers for the first time thanks to its ease of use.
How does any lead like this last five years? That's an eternity in tech time. If I had to guess, it'd be this: for most of that time, Android, split between Google on the software end and the various OEMs on the device side, have attempted to catch up via hardware instead of software. Interface lag wasn't something google could address in graphics acceleration since it had to deal with legacy devices without such hardware, and hardware manufacturers had to try to catch up through brute force processing speed because they couldn't go the accelerated route without Google. Similarly OEMs were caught on the original Android hardware buttons, and unable to ditch them because of the need to support both the OS and legacy apps, tried to address the problem through less than stellar novelties like capacitive touch buttons. These hardware-centric approaches are in the end just hacks to get at the same thing Apple did five years ago in software, and ones that haven't held up all too well.
steve jobs on computers
December 16, 2011 - 9:36pm — andrewThis video from the Computer History Museum is probably among the clearest explanations Steve Jobs ever gave of what computers should do. I don't know that his vision ever strayed far from this early rendering - it certainly speaks to all that Apple did under his leadership.
Close Buttons
October 13, 2011 - 2:59pm — andrewThis story against iOS's close buttons is getting more attention, and while Gruber's argument against it (that gesture-based solutions are non-obvious and therefore insufficient for iOS) is sound, I think a more important criticism is that the entire point of the close buttons in iOS is that they are difficult to use, intentionally.
For the tab closing, app-quitting, notification-center-clearing activities in which the close button is used, there is no going back - these operations don`t respond to "shake to undo", and there's no command-z available. These also represent instances where there may be significant data loss for a mistaken trigger. If I close an active Safari tab with unsaved work in a form, that's gone for good. If I quit an app that's still processing something for me, oh well. And if I clear my notifications in error, it's back to the bad old (recent) days of news lost to the ether.
That's why I think these buttons exist and operate the way they do - in accordance with what Jeff Atwood called the Opposite of Fitts' Law:
Don't forget to follow the opposite of Fitts' law, too -- uncommon or dangerous UI items should be difficult to click on!
Closing these items should be more difficult than opening or creating them, and should require deliberate effort.
Lessons learned
October 13, 2011 - 12:45pm — andrewThis interview is a worthwhile read, but something strikes me about the first question:
Q Your most recent book blames the 2008 financial crisis, like the crash of the 1920s, on the income gap between the very rich and the rest of society. Will it happen again?
A It’s unbelievable how no lessons seem to have been learned from that terrible crash. The evidence we point to in the book suggests that when the concentration of wealth at the top reaches extreme levels, as it has in North America recently and did in the 1920s, it creates financial instability, leading to a crash.
I think we have a hopeful tendency to excuse malice as ignorance, the actions of power as unfortunate accident. In the context of the United States, there's no evidence that we as a society didn't learn lessons from the Great Depression and the preceding years of excess - the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act points rather clearly to an understanding of the role finance played in that crisis. The repeal of that and other legislation meant to safeguard us from runaway wealth stems not from a collective unlearning of these lessons, but instead the concerted efforts of those same powerful institutions of wealth that benefited most from our public bailouts when the resulting system collapsed.
By the time Gramm-Leach-Bliley passed in 2001, it was probably too late for our learning or ignorance to have mattered too much - the wealthiest few were by then so enriched, holding such powerful sway over our levers of government, that collective knowledge of our history and its causes would be meaningless. Those at the suffering end of this unequal system have long been warning of its perils, but they have scarce chance of converting that awareness into policy. Rather than posit the downfall of our system as the failure of our elites to hear this message, though, it bears considering whether it reflects instead the successful pursuit of their intended program.
Questions about Siri
October 9, 2011 - 9:00pm — andrewLast week, Apple announced its human-language AI assistant, Siri. The technology looks interesting now, and I'll be excited to try it, but I think the most exciting aspects of it are yet to come. Some things I'm wondering:
- Will Siri be rolled out to other Apple products, or will it be iPhone-only?
- Will Siri voice control be the answer to user interface problems with AppleTV? If so, where does the microphone go?
- How long before Siri on my phone is talking to Siri on your phone without either of us humans interacting directly?
- When will Siri begin to distinguish between users (and their different data associations) by the sound of their voices?
- What will it look like to have mobile payments fully integrated into a device with Siri? When will Siri be able to run our errands for us?
- how long has iOS autocorrected Siri to capitalize it?
fixing wifi issues in lion
September 26, 2011 - 11:56pm — andrewI moved my home office today and found that my mac was no longer able to connect to my 5GHz 802.11n wifi network. Turns out it was likely an issue when I installed OS X Lion, I just didn't notice the network selection problem because a) I've been traveling, and b) I use a dual-band router with a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g network as well. Hunting around for a solution that worked for me took a while, so here's what I tried, in case any intrepid google-searchers come across this.
I was getting an error that a "connection timeout occurred" any time I tried to select my 5GHz network. Per advice online at Apple's forums and elsewhere, I attempted:
- resetting the router
- resetting the password
- changing the encryption to WPA2 rather than the WPA/WPA2 my Time Capsule offers
- deleting keychain items for my wifi networks
- deleting networks from my preferred list in Preferences
- moving my router
- resetting the computer
None of these did anything. From an old forum about a different issue entirely, I read a suggestion to set the router to manual channel selection, since a router in a crowded radio environment can hunt for an open channel too rapidly to form a stable connection. Upon changing this in my Airport Utility, the 5GHz network again became usable on my Mac. Huzzah!
textastic
June 14, 2011 - 3:54pm — andrewiPad only
pros: powerful text editor with integrated ftp client and html preview
cons: ftp client lacks some needed tools, no syntax-highlight customization
Until Panic get around to releasing Coda for iOS, this is the best replacement I've found for doing hand-coded web design on iPad. It's what I used to design the food security site I mentioned recently, and I've found the html preview function to be a great way to quickly prototype both my html structure and my stylesheets, switching from code to preview in a flash. Coupled with a hardware keyboard, this makes the iPad into a pretty fierce mobile web-design machine. With this setup, I'd feel content to travel for long periods without a Mac, and not fear that I'd risk neglecting any of the sites I maintain.
However, there are a few issues that give me pause, or at least have proven frustrating. First, if you're used to using Coda along with a local copy of your site, you'll have to do without any php or database with textastic - the html preview is great, but it's no apache server. Second, if you do need to preview something hosted on an external server, like you can in Coda, you'll again be out of luck - Textastic relies on a fairly frustrating workflow where changes to a downloaded document are autosaved locally, but must be manually uploaded to the server, and all previews within the app are only of the local copy, so you'll have to switch back to a browser to test anything that depends on that database or php. On the more niggling end of complaints, while recent versions have included previews of image files and other non-text documents you may have in your folders, the default behavior is to attempt to open them as text files with a warning - why not open as an image by default instead, and make open-as-text the multi-step option? Finally, because the syntax coloring isn't what I'm used to in some file types, I find myself wishing constantly that there were some way to customize this.
Altogether, though, Textastic is a workable, attractive option for anyone looking to do hand-coded web design on iPad, and the developer has clearly put a lot of care and effort into the app. I hope some of the wrinkles are ironed out in future releases, but even if they're not, I'd still recommend it as a buy.
reviews
June 14, 2011 - 2:56pm — andrewI'm going to start including reviews of the software and hardware I use, with the dual hopes that it will (a) allow me to better understand what it is about the things I use that I like and dislike, and (b) provide useful information for others considering purchases or acquisitions. You'll be able to find these in the blog, or in a new reviews section.
procreate
June 14, 2011 - 2:25pm — andrewiPad only
pros: custom brushes, many layers, super-fast, great design
cons: no full-document export without iTunes
This is the best drawing and painting app I've used so far - developers Savage Interactive exhibit the sort of attention to detail and obsession with perfection that yields apps that just feel right on the iOS platform, and their keen understanding of the needs of digital artists shows through as well. Procreate is designed from the ground up to live on the iPad, leveraging openGL for all rendering, and using every resource at its disposal. The 16-layer maximum is the hardware limit, and far surpasses most iOS art apps' limit of 6.
iOS 5 and the cloud
June 7, 2011 - 9:55am — andrewyesterday, apple released the fifth major iteration of their lightweight os, which now animates all iphones, ipods touch, and ipads, as well as newer appletvs. there are a number of new features, but i thought i'd consider a few that will make the largest difference in my use of those devices.
1. pc free
in my writeup in april, i complained that for all its post-pc aspirations, the ipad suffered from an unfortunate dependence on a mac or pc home base, for initial setup, backup, and some document transfer. ios 5 does away with all that nonsense - along with icloud's demotion of the mac from digital hub to a mere device, apple's new data storage and sync paradigm enables ios devices to operate without any base computer. so that $500 entry-level ipad is finally a total system unto itself. as much as i recommended the ipad previously, there were some use cases that itunes syncing made problematic - this was especially true for first-time computer users, for whom the ipad would have otherwise been perfect, but who would need some sort of confusing bridge computer or a kind friend or relative to host the itunes backups. this is probably the best news of the whole announcement yesterday, especially for any of us who provide tech support to our social networks, and signals apple's real determination that ios is where they want most users to go in the long term.
2. multitouch gestures
while developers have been playing with these for months now, it's good to see that the swipe-to-multitask gestures are making it to all users. along with identical gestures for similar behavior in osx lion, these will vastly speed multitasking on the ipad, bringing it to something that, at least from a user perspective, feels more like the command-tab app switching that mac os power users enjoy. if you haven't tried these, this will be a real treat, and a real productivity booster.
3. reminders
brilliant to-do implementation that took about 4 years too long - why didn't the original iphone have this again? but i won't complain too much - the push and geolocation features here are really quite something. reminders will let you set your ios device to notify you of a task when you meet certain location conditions, when entering or notably even when leaving a defined area. have you ever needed to do something right after you leave work, or even just the next time you leave home? yeah, this will remind you with a push alert on your iphone or whatever. i've really enjoyed location-aware task management with omnifocus, but building it into the os and adding when-i-leave functionality will be great for a lot of people.
4. free icloud
i've long been in that weird minority who happily paid $99 per year for mobileme, and the contact, calendar, and data syncing it provided have been well worth the investment. i've also long thought that this added so much value and joy to the ios experience - particularly ability to go long periods without itunes syncing and still have up-to-date calendars and contacts across all my devices - that apple would do well to build the features in for all users. well, now they have - most of the previous mobileme services have been wrapped into icloud, and will be free for all apple users. free is really the magic here - it ensures that you can count on all users to have these services, so long as they have a recent ios device. this is really meaningful for developers, who might have avoided integrating with idisk, or even dropbox, because only a fraction of users would be able to leverage those services. icloud, being free and available to all, will be the go-to cloud storage and sync method for apps.
my concerns here are several, however. users will get 5gb of storage, not counting music, apps, books and photos. that might be a lot for storing the average user's pages or keynote documents, but within a few short months i'll have a good bit more artwork than that on my ipad, and other media not included in the icloud freebies already makes up more than the 5gb limit. looking at the list of information included in icloud's backups of ios devices, 5gb will be a pretty laughable amount for me for this purpose alone. will i be able to pay more and get more storage? similarly, will there be a way to pay a premium to extend the photo storage maximums beyond 1000 images and 30 days?
also, if i have several ios devices registered to one store account, some of which are used by other members of my household, will those other users be able to create individual icloud or @me.com accounts, and if so, will they still be able to get the apps, music, and books purchased by the currentlty central itunes account? this is an important questions for families, who so far have been able to share one store account, but who nonetheless require app data to be stored in different accounts. mobileme had a family feature, though, so perhaps icloud can address this problem satisfactorily.
5. imessage
living in a different country than my family and many of my friends, facetime has changed the way i call to catch up or check in. imessage promises to do the same for text messaging, as many of the people i currently txt with are iphone users. my biggest hope here - that imessage replaces or integrates with messages on the iphone the way facetime integrates with phone, and that it is more transparent to the user. i get so many text messages from iphone-using friends, which is aggravating given that we obviously both have email, which is free to use. there's an immediacy to texting, however, as well as habit, and so i keep getting texts i have to pay for rather than emails i don't. apple goes for there carriers' lunch money here, and i'm glad for it - provided apple makes it easy enough and transparent enough that imessages are the default when you try to text someone with an iphone.