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iOS 6 Maps might be hazardous to your health

Now, I’m sure Apple has great things in store for the future.

But I’m also pretty sure that they’ve got an irritatingly high-horse first-world view of how people use maps (as if we all drove around everywhere or wasted time looking at 3D views all day long), and that they botched this one up in what I can only term an epic fashion.

As much as I love their hardware and the rest of their software, this is the kind of thing that seriously annoys people2 — in real life.

Regardless of their parting ways with Google and whatnot, there is an unwritten commandment in technology that roughly states thou shalt not royally fuck up common use cases of your product.

Tao of Mac

That’s the best quote i’ve seen in a long time. Unfortunately, Apple, Google, Microsoft and a couple more couldn’t find it even if they actually tried to.

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Website pagination: Stories should load into a single page every time

I don’t disagree that these are nice benefits from pagination. But I think that thoughtful design can improve how long articles look on the Web. One example of this is the Verge, which publishes very long pieces every day and makes them look stunning and manageable without page breaks. In its long pieces, the Verge breaks up blocks of text with photos and design elements like pull-quotes, and each article has internal navigation buttons that let you go to specific sections of the piece. (In this review of the new Kindle, for instance, you can click on “Hardware” or “Software, battery” to scroll directly to those topics.)

I asked Joshua Topolsky, the Verge’s editor, whether he had a hard time convincing the advertising sales department at the magazine to ditch pages. He said he didn’t: “From the beginning, there’s been a company-wide belief that we can marry great advertising with great content and not have to cheat or trick our users,” Topolsky emailed. “And so far, that’s proven 100 percent correct. Our traffic has been on a big climb, and I believe advertisers are really beginning to see the true value in engaged users who care (and return) versus sheer volume of pageviews (though our pageviews have also been through the roof).”

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