The editorials at this site are so amateurishly written - does the person writing these even have a degree in journalism or any qualifications to even write an editorial? Seriously, what intelligent person thinks Apple can only work on one thing at a time? It can't add features at the same time it revamps the interface - are you kidding?
Apple has never stated, in advance, what new features would be contained in any future iOS release. So just be patient and wait for WWDC before making presumptions and straw hat arguments to form the basis of a badly written editorial.
Yeah it drives me nuts when we hear how Apple is making Siri more whimsical. That's not what we need. The fact people were/are using Siri just to ask it stupid questions to get some cute/funny/smart ass reply back should be a bit of an embarrassment for Apple.
Being "whimsical" is what gives Siri " her winning personalty". The most "popular" kids at school weren't always the smartest and most clever kids, but they were uually the ones who were the most fun to be around and made you happier. In that respect, I'd say cellphone are a lot alike.
This is a great article, and I hope apple is listening. My biggest wish for the new iOS is some type of useful file management system. I want to use this iPhone (& iPad) to create and share, not just consume. The operative word is "useful"--I haven't seen a touch os that has the capability of a mouse/trackpad system.
What iOS actually needs is more basic features, like simple dedicated Calculator and Weather apps on iPad, and an actual dictionary app across all devices. It's frustrating having to open notes to type a word you want to look up. It'd be a much nicer experience to open a dictionary app to do this, like on OS X.
Beyond this we need features like scrollable folders. You know, so you don't need to create 3 games folders. And up-to-date app icons would be nice for weather, clock and all calendar apps. A silently ticking clock icon, for example. Or a weather icon that shows a tiny preview of local weather with the actual temperature (these icons could update hourly, and be limited to a specific subset of apps like these, with app icons for things like games given no such option). Also small features like "quick reply" for texts and unread Mail badges that update automatically without having to, you know, open the app. That would be nice, and useful, and user friendly, and not so complicated to add to the system.
What's the weather like now? Look at Weather icon. What's the current time to the very second? Look at Clock icon. What's the day and date? Look at Calendar icon, even a third party one. Where is that game again? Oh yeah, all my games are in my 'scrollable' game folder. I need to look up a word I just heard? Open the dictionary app. I need to perform a quick everyday calculation while using my iPad? Open the Calculator app. How many unread e-mails have I? Look at Mail icon (unread count now updates automatically). I just received an sms, but I'd like to quickly reply without leaving what I'm doing? Tap "quick reply", type something short, tap "send", continue doing.
These are the kinds of features I would like Apple to pay attention to. The kinds of features absolutely everyone will use and actually need on a regular basis. I need these things everyday, I'd bet most people do.
I have written very detailed posts on here before outlining my own wish list for what I feel are some major shortcomings in iOS but I do not feel like going into that much detail again. But I think is is time for a major overhaul. iOS is essentially like the application window on OS X with touch. But unlike the OS X finder window which allows you to sort and search by numerous criteria you can do none of that in iOS. Now that people routinely have hundreds if not even thousands of apps on their iPhones and iPads there has to be a better way to find what you are looking for faster than the current method of swiping page after page hunting for an app. If you know the name of the app it is easy to find with spotlight, but there are a lot of apps I often look for where I have no idea what the name is. I can usually remember some info about the app but ultimately you just have to scroll page after page and folder after folder until you find it. It just feels like a layer of the GUI is missing and I think if Apple is about simplification and ease of use they can figure out an elegant way to speed up the process for finding apps and quickly accessing and changing settings.
No, I do not think change just for the sake of change is good but I am all for change that improves upon the user experience. I have not personally used the new Blackberry OS but some of the videos I watched showed some innovative ideas. Even Web OS had a great deal of potential but Palm then HP just weren't able to make compelling enough hardware to see it grow. I do not mention those examples in the hope that Apple would copy those features but just as proof that innovation and new ideas are still out there. Smart phones are fast becoming computers that happen to also allow telephone calls instead of the other way around and I think Apple can do better than screen after screen of apps staring at us.
I don't agree with all of these on the list by any means but it is a pretty exhaustive list with many good ideas.
I didn't take his comments as going that far. More like change for the sake of change isn't a good enough reason. And stake and bored without more detailed examples are just bitching.
Except that graphic design is fashion and what's considered contemporary changes over time. That's why Aqua (which I happened to like quite a bit) looked fantastic when it was released, but looks a little funky now. You look at ads from a few years ago and the fonts seem "old fashioned". Sometimes Helvetica is in and sometimes it's out, etc. Apple used to pay a lot more attention to typography in the OS than it does now.
You can update the graphic look and feel without making the OS unfamiliar. It used to be that only Apple knew how to accomplish quality graphic design. But we no longer look at the OS and say, "wow!". And in spite of the disadvantages of all the different versions of Android or the failure (so far) of Windows 8 and its offshoots on phones, when you casually look at those, they look as good as Apple. Since most phones perform the same functions, I think Apple has to get back the "wow" factor so that when you look at a screen of any Apple OS, it blows you away as compared to the competition. When the iPhone was first released, it accomplished exactly that -- it immediately made every other phone seem obsolete. To a lesser extent, Apple accomplished the same thing when it released the iPad. I think most people felt, "this is how it should be done", even if they felt it was a bit expensive. Apple needs to create that same distinction once again between its products and the competition to prevent erosion of their sales to the many competitors. This article and other critics can say every negative thing in the world about Android but the fact remains that it's taking lots of sales from Apple, no matter how inferior it may be under the covers.
Personally, while I do think it's important for Apple to get away from such looks as that ugly game page posted above, I'm not necessarily sure that a completely flat and mostly colorless interface is the way to go. Do we really want it to look like the first Mac OS?
One thing people are missing. Apple has to be very careful about what changes they make. When iOS 7 hits it will be on hundreds of millions of devices within weeks of release. If Apple gets it right then their entire user base is happy with their upgrade to iOS 7. If they get it wrong then they can also upset their entire user base.
Android doesn't have this problem because of the delays in getting updates out. So if they make a major mistake it only affects a small percentage of people on the newest devices. They have time to "fix" things and the PR damage is minimal since most Android users will be unaware of the new version anyway.
People may want a complete re-design of iOS, but it's a huge gamble for Apple. They have to be very careful when thinking about changing things.
One thing people are missing. Apple has to be very careful about what changes they make. When iOS 7 hits it will be on hundreds of millions of devices within weeks of release. If Apple gets it right then their entire user base is happy with their upgrade to iOS 7. If they get it wrong then they can also upset their entire user base.
Android doesn't have this problem because of the delays in getting updates out. So if they make a major mistake it only affects a small percentage of people on the newest devices. They have time to "fix" things and the PR damage is minimal since most Android users will be unaware of the new version anyway.
People may want a complete re-design of iOS, but it's a huge gamble for Apple. They have to be very careful when thinking about changing things.
Apple is crazy to go to a windows 8 like BORING UI. I have never considered jumping off the Apple platform till I have heard that they are going BACKWARDS on the UI. So UGLY! So Microsoft! Yuck!!!
Apple is crazy to go to a windows 8 like BORING UI. I have never considered jumping off the Apple platform till I have heard that they are going BACKWARDS on the UI. So UGLY! So Microsoft! Yuck!!!
1. Apple is not doing anything.
2. Stop making decisions based on doing zero reading on your part, and on zero actual fact.
Blogger Joshua Merrill has suggested that Apple's new WWDC logo (below) likely represents a stack of colored app icons, where each color represents a particular app. Apple already uses colors to denote function, coding information apps (like Safari, Mail and iWork apps) in blue, telephony and messaging apps in green and utilitarian apps like Settings in grey, a practice that originated on the Mac OS. At WWDC, this concept may be carried ahead even further.
However, whenever Apple has spearheaded its own software development it has delivered important stickiness for its platforms, which can be observed well back into the 1980s from Lisa Office to AppleWorks and in the modern era with iTunes, iWorks, iLife and Pro Apps.
About the colors denoting function. If this theory is correct (which I think it's bullsh!t...or proof that Forstall cared very little for convention and collaboration) when why do apps change color between iOS and OS X? I'd like to see some links to support this argument. If grey is for utilitarian apps (meaning to me systems apps like Find my Mac or iPhone), why are FaceTime and the camera app grey? To me Facetime should be Green. Why is Voice memos app blue and not grey then? Why is the iTunes Store App Purple and not Blue like OS X? Why is the Music App Orange and not Blue like OS X? I'm not really sure what it's meant by "Coding Apps" but that seems like much too broad a term to categorize so many apps with one color. And for that matter, I'd classify Finder as a Utility App, why not Grey instead of blue? I've been wining about how MS's Metro would be so much more user friendly if it were color coded by function, and mentioning that OS X and iOS could benefit from it too. Right now my doc has only the most used apps (mail, safari, message (which is blue and not green BTW) finder, iTunes, docs folder stack (blue BTW) and trash). 6/7 apps all blue, all with very different functionality.
I'd like to se Mr Merrill's source on this theory because right now, it's a clusterf&ck of visual coordination.
Second. Either I'm an ignorant Nube, or you've made a typo (along with a lot of other people in the past on these forums). It's always been "iWork", not iWorks...yes the previous version was AppleWorks and yes maybe it's a term of endearment but if you're publishing something that is a colloquial term, italicize it or some kind of grammatical way to acknowledge that you know it's not the correct naming.
I have another, simple change. There is no need for the bottom menu bar to be so tall in Safari. You could easily shave quite a bit of space above and below the icons and regain some screen real estate.
This is a great article, and I hope apple is listening. My biggest wish for the new iOS is some type of useful file management system. I want to use this iPhone (& iPad) to create and share, not just consume. The operative word is "useful"--I haven't seen a touch os that has the capability of a mouse/trackpad system.
You might want to clarify what you mean by 'useful file system' and 'create and share' because there's a lot of folks out there that find the current file system pretty useful and do a lot of creating and sharing.
If by those terms you want you want a full fledged computer and computer OS in tablet form, you are likely to never get it cause Apple doesn't view that as the way to go with these devices and probably never will.
One thing people are missing. Apple has to be very careful about what changes they make. When iOS 7 hits it will be on hundreds of millions of devices within weeks of release. If Apple gets it right then their entire user base is happy with their upgrade to iOS 7. If they get it wrong then they can also upset their entire user base.
Until the geeks get full tweaking and side loading without having to jailbreak that will happen no matter what Apple does
Now compare that to Microsoft, which after launching Windows 95 also successfully kept things reliably boring for the next ten years. Just like Apple (and largely patterned after the Macintosh, as shown below), Microsoft only added relatively minor changes in how Windows looked and worked until 2006's Windows Vista, which suddenly made far more significant changes in both appearance and behavior.Now compare that to Microsoft, which after launching Windows 95 also successfully kept things reliably boring for the next ten years. Just like Apple (and largely patterned after the Macintosh, as shown below), Microsoft only added relatively minor changes in how Windows looked and worked until 2006's Windows Vista, which suddenly made far more significant changes in both appearance and behavior.
Really? What about Windows XP that looked very different from Windows 95/98, and was the basis from which Vista and Windows 7 improved on.
The editorials at this site are so amateurishly written - does the person writing these even have a degree in journalism or any qualifications to even write an editorial? Seriously, what intelligent person thinks Apple can only work on one thing at a time? It can't add features at the same time it revamps the interface - are you kidding?
I often wonder if he's ghost writing as Mike Elgan over in CultofMac and Michael Steeber on 9to5Mac cause the quality is about the same
I think you probably meant to say Google didn't introduce any new hardware as they often do, which disappointed some folks. All they announced was a lot of new software, features and applications.
Comments
Apple has never stated, in advance, what new features would be contained in any future iOS release. So just be patient and wait for WWDC before making presumptions and straw hat arguments to form the basis of a badly written editorial.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rogifan
Yeah it drives me nuts when we hear how Apple is making Siri more whimsical. That's not what we need. The fact people were/are using Siri just to ask it stupid questions to get some cute/funny/smart ass reply back should be a bit of an embarrassment for Apple.
Being "whimsical" is what gives Siri " her winning personalty". The most "popular" kids at school weren't always the smartest and most clever kids, but they were uually the ones who were the most fun to be around and made you happier. In that respect, I'd say cellphone are a lot alike.
Originally Posted by geojohn
The real problem is OSX, the elephant in the room is the separation of the menu bar from the window. Windows got this right.
This is so flipping far off base it's just laughable. You don't have the first clue what you're talking about.
Agreed, I thought I was doing something wrong when I couldn't just text the photo I'd just taken directly from the camera app!
Beyond this we need features like scrollable folders. You know, so you don't need to create 3 games folders. And up-to-date app icons would be nice for weather, clock and all calendar apps. A silently ticking clock icon, for example. Or a weather icon that shows a tiny preview of local weather with the actual temperature (these icons could update hourly, and be limited to a specific subset of apps like these, with app icons for things like games given no such option). Also small features like "quick reply" for texts and unread Mail badges that update automatically without having to, you know, open the app. That would be nice, and useful, and user friendly, and not so complicated to add to the system.
What's the weather like now? Look at Weather icon. What's the current time to the very second? Look at Clock icon. What's the day and date? Look at Calendar icon, even a third party one. Where is that game again? Oh yeah, all my games are in my 'scrollable' game folder. I need to look up a word I just heard? Open the dictionary app. I need to perform a quick everyday calculation while using my iPad? Open the Calculator app. How many unread e-mails have I? Look at Mail icon (unread count now updates automatically). I just received an sms, but I'd like to quickly reply without leaving what I'm doing? Tap "quick reply", type something short, tap "send", continue doing.
These are the kinds of features I would like Apple to pay attention to. The kinds of features absolutely everyone will use and actually need on a regular basis. I need these things everyday, I'd bet most people do.
Voice memo excluded I feel the opposite way. There are tons of freebies so take these out of the system. They are unneeded bloat.
I have written very detailed posts on here before outlining my own wish list for what I feel are some major shortcomings in iOS but I do not feel like going into that much detail again. But I think is is time for a major overhaul. iOS is essentially like the application window on OS X with touch. But unlike the OS X finder window which allows you to sort and search by numerous criteria you can do none of that in iOS. Now that people routinely have hundreds if not even thousands of apps on their iPhones and iPads there has to be a better way to find what you are looking for faster than the current method of swiping page after page hunting for an app. If you know the name of the app it is easy to find with spotlight, but there are a lot of apps I often look for where I have no idea what the name is. I can usually remember some info about the app but ultimately you just have to scroll page after page and folder after folder until you find it. It just feels like a layer of the GUI is missing and I think if Apple is about simplification and ease of use they can figure out an elegant way to speed up the process for finding apps and quickly accessing and changing settings.
No, I do not think change just for the sake of change is good but I am all for change that improves upon the user experience. I have not personally used the new Blackberry OS but some of the videos I watched showed some innovative ideas. Even Web OS had a great deal of potential but Palm then HP just weren't able to make compelling enough hardware to see it grow. I do not mention those examples in the hope that Apple would copy those features but just as proof that innovation and new ideas are still out there. Smart phones are fast becoming computers that happen to also allow telephone calls instead of the other way around and I think Apple can do better than screen after screen of apps staring at us.
I don't agree with all of these on the list by any means but it is a pretty exhaustive list with many good ideas.
http://oilersmyth.hubpages.com/hub/iOS-7-Wish-List
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChristophB
I didn't take his comments as going that far. More like change for the sake of change isn't a good enough reason. And stake and bored without more detailed examples are just bitching.
Except that graphic design is fashion and what's considered contemporary changes over time. That's why Aqua (which I happened to like quite a bit) looked fantastic when it was released, but looks a little funky now. You look at ads from a few years ago and the fonts seem "old fashioned". Sometimes Helvetica is in and sometimes it's out, etc. Apple used to pay a lot more attention to typography in the OS than it does now.
You can update the graphic look and feel without making the OS unfamiliar. It used to be that only Apple knew how to accomplish quality graphic design. But we no longer look at the OS and say, "wow!". And in spite of the disadvantages of all the different versions of Android or the failure (so far) of Windows 8 and its offshoots on phones, when you casually look at those, they look as good as Apple. Since most phones perform the same functions, I think Apple has to get back the "wow" factor so that when you look at a screen of any Apple OS, it blows you away as compared to the competition. When the iPhone was first released, it accomplished exactly that -- it immediately made every other phone seem obsolete. To a lesser extent, Apple accomplished the same thing when it released the iPad. I think most people felt, "this is how it should be done", even if they felt it was a bit expensive. Apple needs to create that same distinction once again between its products and the competition to prevent erosion of their sales to the many competitors. This article and other critics can say every negative thing in the world about Android but the fact remains that it's taking lots of sales from Apple, no matter how inferior it may be under the covers.
Personally, while I do think it's important for Apple to get away from such looks as that ugly game page posted above, I'm not necessarily sure that a completely flat and mostly colorless interface is the way to go. Do we really want it to look like the first Mac OS?
Android doesn't have this problem because of the delays in getting updates out. So if they make a major mistake it only affects a small percentage of people on the newest devices. They have time to "fix" things and the PR damage is minimal since most Android users will be unaware of the new version anyway.
People may want a complete re-design of iOS, but it's a huge gamble for Apple. They have to be very careful when thinking about changing things.
Android doesn't have this problem because of the delays in getting updates out. So if they make a major mistake it only affects a small percentage of people on the newest devices. They have time to "fix" things and the PR damage is minimal since most Android users will be unaware of the new version anyway.
People may want a complete re-design of iOS, but it's a huge gamble for Apple. They have to be very careful when thinking about changing things.
Apple is crazy to go to a windows 8 like BORING UI. I have never considered jumping off the Apple platform till I have heard that they are going BACKWARDS on the UI. So UGLY! So Microsoft! Yuck!!!
Originally Posted by Patrick Byars
Apple is crazy to go to a windows 8 like BORING UI. I have never considered jumping off the Apple platform till I have heard that they are going BACKWARDS on the UI. So UGLY! So Microsoft! Yuck!!!
1. Apple is not doing anything.
2. Stop making decisions based on doing zero reading on your part, and on zero actual fact.
Blogger Joshua Merrill has suggested that Apple's new WWDC logo (below) likely represents a stack of colored app icons, where each color represents a particular app. Apple already uses colors to denote function, coding information apps (like Safari, Mail and iWork apps) in blue, telephony and messaging apps in green and utilitarian apps like Settings in grey, a practice that originated on the Mac OS. At WWDC, this concept may be carried ahead even further.
However, whenever Apple has spearheaded its own software development it has delivered important stickiness for its platforms, which can be observed well back into the 1980s from Lisa Office to AppleWorks and in the modern era with iTunes, iWorks, iLife and Pro Apps.
About the colors denoting function. If this theory is correct (which I think it's bullsh!t...or proof that Forstall cared very little for convention and collaboration) when why do apps change color between iOS and OS X? I'd like to see some links to support this argument. If grey is for utilitarian apps (meaning to me systems apps like Find my Mac or iPhone), why are FaceTime and the camera app grey? To me Facetime should be Green. Why is Voice memos app blue and not grey then? Why is the iTunes Store App Purple and not Blue like OS X? Why is the Music App Orange and not Blue like OS X? I'm not really sure what it's meant by "Coding Apps" but that seems like much too broad a term to categorize so many apps with one color. And for that matter, I'd classify Finder as a Utility App, why not Grey instead of blue? I've been wining about how MS's Metro would be so much more user friendly if it were color coded by function, and mentioning that OS X and iOS could benefit from it too. Right now my doc has only the most used apps (mail, safari, message (which is blue and not green BTW) finder, iTunes, docs folder stack (blue BTW) and trash). 6/7 apps all blue, all with very different functionality.
I'd like to se Mr Merrill's source on this theory because right now, it's a clusterf&ck of visual coordination.
Second. Either I'm an ignorant Nube, or you've made a typo (along with a lot of other people in the past on these forums). It's always been "iWork", not iWorks...yes the previous version was AppleWorks and yes maybe it's a term of endearment but if you're publishing something that is a colloquial term, italicize it or some kind of grammatical way to acknowledge that you know it's not the correct naming.
https://www.apple.com/iwork/
[IMG]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/25614/[/IMG]
You might want to clarify what you mean by 'useful file system' and 'create and share' because there's a lot of folks out there that find the current file system pretty useful and do a lot of creating and sharing.
If by those terms you want you want a full fledged computer and computer OS in tablet form, you are likely to never get it cause Apple doesn't view that as the way to go with these devices and probably never will.
Until the geeks get full tweaking and side loading without having to jailbreak that will happen no matter what Apple does
Now compare that to Microsoft, which after launching Windows 95 also successfully kept things reliably boring for the next ten years. Just like Apple (and largely patterned after the Macintosh, as shown below), Microsoft only added relatively minor changes in how Windows looked and worked until 2006's Windows Vista, which suddenly made far more significant changes in both appearance and behavior.Now compare that to Microsoft, which after launching Windows 95 also successfully kept things reliably boring for the next ten years. Just like Apple (and largely patterned after the Macintosh, as shown below), Microsoft only added relatively minor changes in how Windows looked and worked until 2006's Windows Vista, which suddenly made far more significant changes in both appearance and behavior.
Really? What about Windows XP that looked very different from Windows 95/98, and was the basis from which Vista and Windows 7 improved on.
I often wonder if he's ghost writing as Mike Elgan over in CultofMac and Michael Steeber on 9to5Mac cause the quality is about the same
New software!? Like what?