REally rich..... how does Apple "Counter" the new Zune... It's like taking a yugo into a Mercedes Dealership and saying, "Do you guys think you can beat this??.
Apple does use a lot of transition effects in their UI. These effects are slower than if they no transition. But I think the landscape to portrait mode speed may be a result of the constrained HW, though it snappy enough to not be an issue. I guess we?ll find out when the next iPhone comes out.
PS: Holding down the Shift key when doing commands with transitions, like minimizing a window is kinda cool when you have Genie Effect turned on.
I don't think it is better than the iPod, but do like the idea of a radio tuner built in. HD is too new for a lot of people to benefit, plus no AM. AM HD could be sweet. I hope Apple gets with the program and includes radio in future iPods, and I don't mean just the touch.
Yay! There are at least two AM radio fans in the digiverse!
I don't disagree, and compared to some of the UI stuff MS has come up with in the past, what I've seen of the Zune HD is much, much better.
However, my point is that Apple has actually never put "stuff" in its UIs just to be glitzy. The animations all serve a conceptual purpose, and, particularly on the iPhone, the transitions and relationships of UI elements are designed to clarify and inform, not just impress with action.
The Zune HD UI looks to have a lot of "impress with action." Apple would never in a million years do that giant font trick, because it's not helpful. It's the purest kind of eye candy, with no nutritional value.
So while the Zune UI might make an immediate impression as "fresh", what will it be like to use over the long haul? After the cool factor of the animations have worn off?
And I have to say, I'm not buying the idea that "eye candy" is now permissible even by the regular Joe standards of sturdy PC users, who once eschewed such things as the provenance of dandies and effete snobs, just because of increased graphics firepower in the hardware.
The idea of the Mac as a twee toy has been central to PC chauvinism for as long as I can remember. They just didn't have patience for all that silliness. Now that silliness is in vogue at MS, however, I guess that's just non-operational, which of course was pretty predictable.
Thank you. I was about to make a post entirely based on UI design...not really knowing anything about UI design. I am a graphic designer, however, and I see the ZuneHD's UI as simply useless in the name of being "edgy". This is the same thing done with Vista. OS X, over the years, has had all sorts of elegant (and occasionally not-so-elegant) eye candy that has generally improved the interface and did not get in the way of the user's experience. Vista, on the other hand, is chalk full of useless eye candy that does nothing but get in your way...and even get in Vista's way by slowing it down due to the need for rendering all that extra useless "aero" garbage.
The UI is the user's direct interface to the operating system/application and to truncate any information is simply design for design's sake. That is to say, there is graphic design that speaks directly to its audience, and then there is graphic design that simply speaks to graphic designers...and really only speaks to them on that "woah...thats cool!" level. Its superficial at best. Apple doesn't pull that kind of thing with OS X (or the iPhone/iPod) because they don't have to try as hard to design better. They have consistently shown elegant, high design, that speaks to people...normal, everyday, average people. Their interfaces are clean and neat and display all the information that is needed to show without being flashy.
As for the device itself...the demo in the clip did nothing to prove to me that ZuneHD is ready to take on the iPod Touch. The demo showed missed "flicks" where the OS didn't even register them (at least when my iPod misses them its cause it was loading a webpage and will eventually register them...this was the ZuneHD's main interface where it failed = no bueno), the whole "smoother" accelerometer thing seems like a great idea at first, but I am usually on my couch with my iPod Touch surfing blogs and reading at odd diagonal angles that just barely keep it from rotating to landscape...but even when the angle gets extreme enough, I have at least a second or two to reposition the device so it won't. The accelerometer in the iPhone/iPod is perfectly smooth enough for the applications that make the most use of it...like games and inclinometer apps. If I were surfing IE (that alone makes me shudder) on my ZuneHD on my couch, I'd probably have to sit up and hold it straight so it didn't rotate on me every second.
I see this device being a good thing and a bad thing for MS...good that it will get the MS fans to have something they refuse to buy from Apple...and bad because many more people don't care about MS the way the fans do and would rather have something that isn't contrived.
It looks decent, though the interface doesn't look all that great, at least the touch functions work, unlike frustrating WinMo phones, where you press and pray.
I wish them luck. They are really Apple's only competitor to the iPod Touch that I know of.
Their biggest downfall will surely be not opening the ZuneHD platform up to Mac users.
I'm really surprised that the Zune has a section called "podcasts". Why didn't Apple trademark this term? And why would MSFT want to pay homage to Apple's invention?
In the typical MSFT modus operandi, I would have expected to see "Zunecasts" just like Widgets were brilliantly renamed to Gadgets in Vista.
Yay! There are at least two AM radio fans in the digiverse!
I grew up with Jim Lange on my TV and my radio. Sure, gone are the days of real radio, but some day, things will get better. I hope LPFM takes off. I would prefer it to HD radio. The iPod, Zune, and especially Sirius XM have not killed the radio. We just need to go back to the good old days when a company could not own more than 7 AM, 7 FM, and 7 TV. I suppose you iPhone junkies want radio to fail so the FCC can sell off those frequencies too. \
It doesn't matter because 2008 is past and the world is going to end in 2012 (you know the Mayan calendar ends that year!)
You'd think the Mayan's could plan ahead a little or something - geesh.
And what good is a calendar that lasts for centuries past your own civilization anyway?
And what about the cyclical nature of things? I saw some program on that and there is some sort of galactic alignment happened near the end of 2012 and all kinds of predictions about what the impact will be- my prediction - the effect will be nothing at all - less even than the Y2k fuss (which actually is more like a case of had we not scrambled to check and fix things then it likely would have been really bad but we managed to avert pretty much all possible consequences by being prepared).
Okay *maybe* the tides will be a fraction of an inch higher for a month or something like that - but unless there is some sort of gamma ray burst or supernova of a star right next door - I just don't see any reason to panic.
Comments
REally rich..... how does Apple "Counter" the new Zune...
Apple does use a lot of transition effects in their UI. These effects are slower than if they no transition. But I think the landscape to portrait mode speed may be a result of the constrained HW, though it snappy enough to not be an issue. I guess we?ll find out when the next iPhone comes out.
PS: Holding down the Shift key when doing commands with transitions, like minimizing a window is kinda cool when you have Genie Effect turned on.
I don't think it is better than the iPod, but do like the idea of a radio tuner built in. HD is too new for a lot of people to benefit, plus no AM. AM HD could be sweet. I hope Apple gets with the program and includes radio in future iPods, and I don't mean just the touch.
Yay! There are at least two AM radio fans in the digiverse!
I don't disagree, and compared to some of the UI stuff MS has come up with in the past, what I've seen of the Zune HD is much, much better.
However, my point is that Apple has actually never put "stuff" in its UIs just to be glitzy. The animations all serve a conceptual purpose, and, particularly on the iPhone, the transitions and relationships of UI elements are designed to clarify and inform, not just impress with action.
The Zune HD UI looks to have a lot of "impress with action." Apple would never in a million years do that giant font trick, because it's not helpful. It's the purest kind of eye candy, with no nutritional value.
So while the Zune UI might make an immediate impression as "fresh", what will it be like to use over the long haul? After the cool factor of the animations have worn off?
And I have to say, I'm not buying the idea that "eye candy" is now permissible even by the regular Joe standards of sturdy PC users, who once eschewed such things as the provenance of dandies and effete snobs, just because of increased graphics firepower in the hardware.
The idea of the Mac as a twee toy has been central to PC chauvinism for as long as I can remember. They just didn't have patience for all that silliness. Now that silliness is in vogue at MS, however, I guess that's just non-operational, which of course was pretty predictable.
Thank you. I was about to make a post entirely based on UI design...not really knowing anything about UI design. I am a graphic designer, however, and I see the ZuneHD's UI as simply useless in the name of being "edgy". This is the same thing done with Vista. OS X, over the years, has had all sorts of elegant (and occasionally not-so-elegant) eye candy that has generally improved the interface and did not get in the way of the user's experience. Vista, on the other hand, is chalk full of useless eye candy that does nothing but get in your way...and even get in Vista's way by slowing it down due to the need for rendering all that extra useless "aero" garbage.
The UI is the user's direct interface to the operating system/application and to truncate any information is simply design for design's sake. That is to say, there is graphic design that speaks directly to its audience, and then there is graphic design that simply speaks to graphic designers...and really only speaks to them on that "woah...thats cool!" level. Its superficial at best. Apple doesn't pull that kind of thing with OS X (or the iPhone/iPod) because they don't have to try as hard to design better. They have consistently shown elegant, high design, that speaks to people...normal, everyday, average people. Their interfaces are clean and neat and display all the information that is needed to show without being flashy.
As for the device itself...the demo in the clip did nothing to prove to me that ZuneHD is ready to take on the iPod Touch. The demo showed missed "flicks" where the OS didn't even register them (at least when my iPod misses them its cause it was loading a webpage and will eventually register them...this was the ZuneHD's main interface where it failed = no bueno), the whole "smoother" accelerometer thing seems like a great idea at first, but I am usually on my couch with my iPod Touch surfing blogs and reading at odd diagonal angles that just barely keep it from rotating to landscape...but even when the angle gets extreme enough, I have at least a second or two to reposition the device so it won't. The accelerometer in the iPhone/iPod is perfectly smooth enough for the applications that make the most use of it...like games and inclinometer apps. If I were surfing IE (that alone makes me shudder) on my ZuneHD on my couch, I'd probably have to sit up and hold it straight so it didn't rotate on me every second.
I see this device being a good thing and a bad thing for MS...good that it will get the MS fans to have something they refuse to buy from Apple...and bad because many more people don't care about MS the way the fans do and would rather have something that isn't contrived.
I wish them luck. They are really Apple's only competitor to the iPod Touch that I know of.
Their biggest downfall will surely be not opening the ZuneHD platform up to Mac users.
In the typical MSFT modus operandi, I would have expected to see "Zunecasts" just like Widgets were brilliantly renamed to Gadgets in Vista.
Yay! There are at least two AM radio fans in the digiverse!
I grew up with Jim Lange on my TV and my radio. Sure, gone are the days of real radio, but some day, things will get better. I hope LPFM takes off. I would prefer it to HD radio. The iPod, Zune, and especially Sirius XM have not killed the radio. We just need to go back to the good old days when a company could not own more than 7 AM, 7 FM, and 7 TV. I suppose you iPhone junkies want radio to fail so the FCC can sell off those frequencies too.
It doesn't matter because 2008 is past and the world is going to end in 2012
You'd think the Mayan's could plan ahead a little or something - geesh.
And what good is a calendar that lasts for centuries past your own civilization anyway?
And what about the cyclical nature of things? I saw some program on that and there is some sort of galactic alignment happened near the end of 2012 and all kinds of predictions about what the impact will be- my prediction - the effect will be nothing at all - less even than the Y2k fuss (which actually is more like a case of had we not scrambled to check and fix things then it likely would have been really bad but we managed to avert pretty much all possible consequences by being prepared).
Okay *maybe* the tides will be a fraction of an inch higher for a month or something like that - but unless there is some sort of gamma ray burst or supernova of a star right next door - I just don't see any reason to panic.