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 I can honestly say that if I was going to spend SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on a phone, I’d probably plump for this one. All the quicktours there are worth watching, but my favourite thing rolled past in a still image that I can no longer find: ‘Slide to unlock’. A little place-marker on slider bar. I get the feeling this thing is going to seem a lot more futuristic and exciting once you get to use it. If I didn’t know any better I’d be looking forward to what other people are going to do in response to this – how more affordable touch-screens or even just smarter interfaces will now take it upon themselves to also achieve such far-future concepts as scrolling to someone who’s name begins with m in under half an hour. But I have a feeling I won’t be able to enjoy such luxuries without snacking on the poison Apple – and paying SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS for the privelege – at any point in the next couple of years. So I’d be happy enough if my 10MB phone was capable of storing more than FIVE KILOBYTES of text messages. I mean, proportionally that’s a considerable upgrade from the one kilobyte my last one had, but I’m not really feeling the ten thousand times more breathing room yet. I’d probably spring the SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS if I really thought Apple were design geniuses, but doesn’t it feel more like the only other people getting these things made are agonisingly, unspeakably dumb? I’m holding out for the day someone who isn’t evil gets a brain and a budget in the same lifetime, at least until the incompetent and malicious drop their prices a bit. | ||
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Dabs: Sounds good. How much are these things?
ade: No, not cheap but, yes, extremely impressive. I wonder how long it is until O2 are giving them away free with one year contracts. A while, I'd imagine...
Jason L: Yes, Apple's stuff is just as arbitrary as everyone else's. I was really enthusiatic about MacOS X until I used it as my primary work environment for five months of this year. Some of the most basic and common interactions are just completely lacking in underlying logic, in a way that's fundamentally different from Windows and the dozen or so X window managers I've used. It took my grandmother a year to learn to do stuff on her Mac, and her desktop is a sight to make a strong man weep.
I also help a guy do what he wants in iTunes, which to be fair is actually quite a good program - otherwise I wouldn't have him using it, right? Things like the undocumented and invisible playlist sort field and its handling of duplicate tracks, though, seem actively obstructive. I also happen to have had a converation with a coworker yesterday who couldn't figure out how to get his iPod to sync more than once with iTunes; I've never been impressed by the iPod, so making it the linchpin of their marketing and industrial design doesn't work on me. I suspect Apple gets by on two things: first, as everyone's noticed for years, their purely visual elegance pulls in the doubloons from idiots. More subtly, I didn't use Macs during the pre-X days as they were completely irrelevant...but I suspect modern Apple stuff may be riding the reputation from a genuinely superior predecessor: See this essay by a former Mac industrial designer. http://www.asktog.co... ...Fitts.html Alex Holland: Here's an interesting story. My fianceé has very bad RSI. She's tried various types of keyboard, but the only one she found that worked was the Touchstream LP, which allows zero-pressure typing. The whole thing is basically two wodges of graphics tablet, completely flat, with a keyboard drawn on them. It uses clever multi-touch technology to know if you're typing, resting your hand, using it as a mouse touchpad, etc. It also supports gestures - drag to scroll, pinch to cut, reverse-pinch to paste, etc. Technology uncannily similar to the multi-touch on the iPhone, actually...
About eighteen months ago, just before we were going to buy one of these keyboards, a mysterious unnamed company bought Fingerworks and their entire patent library, slapped NDAs on everyone down to the factory caretakers, and shutdown production. The prices of the remaining keyboards rocketed, and we eventually managed to get on Ebay for about £400. So on the one hand, I think the iPhone looks fantastic. On the other hand, Apple are complete buggers for killing the only product that has allowed Pen and others to use a keyboard again, just for the sake of a little gadget that does neat stuff, and presumably gains them a hat made of money. If they don't release some kind of iKeyboard soon (or integrate it into a laptop), I'll be annoyed.
Jason L: Well, though you can't see it in that article, elsewhere he's constantly admitting mistakes and limitations and encouraging (for various features) Apple to copy MS, MS to copy Apple, everybody to copy Be, Apple to copy themselves...I think he cares more about getting things right than political gain. The "sucking" idea applies not to the option the designer thinks likely but to the menu as a whole, and is immediately noted as potentially frustrating. On reflection if I'd wanted to give a more positive impression of him, I should have linked to his "Reasons the Dock Still Sucks" piece. I didn't because my attempted point wasn't Fitts' Law or Tog himself, but my suspicion that unbeknownst to the public Apple has shifted from a culture of sober UI design to a culture of immediate salable flash.
Alex Holland: So, plenty of patents, but not it seems the right to use the name.
I personally use OS X because it's a happy middleground between Windows and Linux; I've got a good CLI and free developy bits if I want them, but I also have essential bits of software (Office, Photoshop, Civ 3) and a system that doesn't need too much fiddling with. I agree that some bits of the UI are utterly broken though, and I don't even begin to understand the logic behind iPhoto's UI. My preferred commentator on OS X (un)usability is John Siracusa at Ars Technica. Jason L: Alex Holland: A tiny attempt to be helpful if she's typing words - not many people know about Dasher ( http://www.inference... ...uk/dasher/ ). I've used it and it works.
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