Getting Away With It

It seems like Apple is turning away from design consistency and back to design uniformity. […] Apps in iOS 7 lack any personality of their own. Unlike on iOS 6, the stock apps all inherit the system’s spartan personality. […] All that really changes from one app to the other is the accent color used to distinguish buttons from text labels.

On the iOS 7 Redesign @ r-ch.net

When I was sixteen years old, I dreamed of a day that I’d be able to work at Apple, and when the day came that I got an email forwarded down to me from Steve about how the blue in the icon wasn’t beautiful enough, I knew I was living that dream.

Mantia » Steve Jobs and I

In the end, what’s wrong with iOS isn’t the dark linen behind the app icons at the bottom of the screen, but the fact that iOS ought to have much better inter-application management and navigation than users fiddling with tiny icons. I’m fairly sure most Apple users would gladly continue to use what are supposed to be skeuomorphically challenged Calendar or Notebook apps for another thousand years if Apple could only solve the far more vexing software problems of AppleID unification when using iTunes and App Store, or the performance and reliability of the same. And yet these are the twin sides of the same systems design problem: the display layer surfacing or hiding the power within or, increasingly, lack thereof.

Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic « counternotions

Very impressed with the new iOS tumblr app. I had given up on the old version and replaced it with a bookmark, but now I’m back to the native app — because now it really feels like a native app, not a wrapper around a javascript-powered UIWebView.

halcy:

sakurina:

Unless Google is doing something they simply aren’t allowed to do, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about. My suspicion is they’re just being drama queens while they get the app finished to give something people to talk about.

Not allowed, such as duplicating built-in iOS functionality? Wasn’t that a thing?

That doesn’t appear to be stopping anyone else these days.

I’m having far too much fun with the World Clock app.

Interesting, discursive Awl post about Apple, Orientalism, the Other, and a lot more besides.

“Who Decides What Gets Sold In The Bookstore?”

I just found out that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

And there’s the conflict. We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook…) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

That’s amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?

Oh Seth. Oh, poor poor Seth Godin.

Hasn’t someone at Amazon mentioned it to you in your ‘exclusive partnership’ with them? Amazon and Apple aren’t running “bookstores”. They’re running content services for their devices. Completely different.

Totally, completely different.

I was driving home on Sunday, listening to the radio, and it occurred to me how different the financial news would be if Apple ($AAPL) was in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI). Of course, being who I am, I went home and built a spreadsheet to recalculate what would have happened if Dow Jones had decided to add Apple to the index instead of Cisco back in 2009. Imagine my surprise to see that the Dow be over 2000 points higher. In real life, the Dow closed at 12,874.04 on Feb 13, 2012. However, if they had added Apple instead of Cisco, the Dow Jones would be at 14,926.95. That’s over 800 points higher than the all-time high of 14,164 previously set on 4/7/2008.

Note to self: the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a made-up number.

Apple, Cisco, and Dow 15000 | Psychohistory

Getting Away With It

Posts tagged #apple

“Who Decides What Gets Sold In The Bookstore?”