Facetime

I really like the way FaceTime was put together, much more than Skype or other video chat alternatives; specially for one factor: the lack of an ‘online status’!

Yes, many people have complained about this ‘missing feature’, but for me it’s, in fact, not a bug but a feature! I hate having the ‘always seeing eye’ that an online status puts on you. When you reach the office and you turn on Skype, everyone on your contact list knows that you reached the office. When you turn it down to go to lunch, everyone knows that you have gone to lunch. If you are late or early or simply not in the mood, your options are simply to go offline, in which case no one can contact you, or invisible, in which case no one knows that they can contact you, or put the ‘busy’ flag which in work hours is basically redundant and ignored.

FaceTime avoids this by basically being the equivalent of a phone. People don’t know when your phone is on or off, or ‘busy’. They simply call you. If you want to answer, you do. If you don’ want to answer, you don’t. That’s it. No pesky ‘online status’, no “why don’t you answer me if i just saw you change your status”, no nothing. It’s, essentially, a video-phone system.

Of course, there’s some drawbacks to this, such as not being able to have ‘asynchronous’ conversations as you have in ‘chats’. But that is where Messages enters. There, you can just leave a text message, and I will get back to you when it’s convenient to me. And you have all the ‘online status’ paraphernalia.

I used to read some articles, back when Messages and FaceTime were put on OS X, about why were they two different systems/apps. Back then, not having or using neither, I couldn’t really understood this question or essentially why Apple had done it this way.

But now? Really, Apple, great idea! Just leave it like this. It’s a great way and a great software to work.

Now, if you could just opensource the FaceTime protocol as you promised…

Nuclear Management

Aceita também que não utilizará estes produtos para qualquer fim que esteja proibido pelas leis dos Estados Unidos, incluindo, sem limitação, o desenvolvimento, a concepção, o fabrico ou a produção de armamento nuclear, mísseis, ou armas biológicas ou químicas.

iTunes Terms of Service in Portuguese for the Portuguese Store

The (most?) stupid thing about iTunes’s “Nuclear clause” is not that it exists or it’s present on a player/media manager program. It’s that Apple has effectively paid translators and, i assume, national lawyers to translate this nonsense onto each national language where the iTunes store operates.

Just out of curiosity, does this mean that, if i would be building a “Nuclear/Chemical/Biological Weapon”, i couldn’t use iTunes for it’s deployment control system (( a capability that iTunes is worldwide known for )) or that i couldn’t use iTunes to listen to music while i was engineering such Weapon of Mass Destruction?

Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac | Xamarin Blog

Today we’re proud to announce Xamarin.Mac, which makes it possible to use C# to build self-contained Mac OS X apps suitable for publication in the Mac App Store.

Smiling Macs with Xamarin

With the release of Xamarin.Mac, it is now possible to build apps in C# for over 2.2 billion devices worldwide: 1.2 billion Windows devices, and using Xamarin, 1 billion Android, iOS, and Mac devices.

Xamarin.Mac allows developers to build fully-native Cocoa applications for Mac OS X with C#. Xamarin.Mac exposes native platform APIs, making it possible for developers to build sophisticated apps that integrate with platform conventions and leverage the rich spectrum of platform-specific functionality that make Mac apps so beautiful and distinctive.

Xamarin Blog

Not being a professional developer, I still haven’t understood what advantages exactly has C# and .Net over something else like Java or Python and QT, (( Speed probably? )) but i find Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza efforts to bring this set of technologies everywhere laudable.

And if it can truly increase and speed up the development of cross-platform applications then it should be embraced / helped. There really shouldn’t be a single (( or a duo of )) dominating operating systems. The easier it is for everyone to use several different Operating Systems, the better, richer and safer the technology world will be.

Prayer

Maybe with Sir Ives in charge of the interface, good judgement will prevail and we’ll see the return of an elegant system that lets me be creative rather than vying for the spotlight with pointless bells and whistles.

a commment in previous Macworld article

So say we all.

OS X Snow Leopard shows signs of becoming Apple’s XP

Snow Leopard has lost more than half its share of all Macs since Lion’s appearance over a year ago, but so far it has been resistant to Mountain Lion’s call to upgrade. In each of the last two months, for example, Snow Leopard’s losses were less than its 12-month average.

Apple also, perhaps just temporarily, extended security support for Snow Leopard when it issued a patch update for the three-year-old operating system in late September, confounding security professionals who had assumed it would stop serving OS X 10.6 with updates, as it had done with earlier editions once two newer versions had been released.

Snow Leopard is no Windows XP – for one thing it’s less than one-third as old as that 11-year-old OS from Microsoft – but the comparisons, what with both posting slow-but-steady declines and their makers’ extending security support, are intriguing.

It’s unclear why Mac users are holding on to Snow Leopard, but one factor may be that it is the newest Apple OS able to run applications written for the PowerPC processor, the Apple/IBM/Motorola-designed CPU used by Macs before Apple announced a switch to Intel in 2005. The first Intel Macs launched in January 2006.

Macworld

Another answer is because mainly both Lion and Mountain Lion suck in usability and productivity, by Apples’ stupid chase of the mythical “virgin new user”, wich somehow managed to avoid any contact with computers, even though in 100% of the countries with sufficient GDP / capita to purchase Apple’s hardware products, you have IT training at one or more levels of your mandatory school education.

There is a great quote by Sir Jonathan Ive that pretty much summarizes the mistake that Apple has been doing:

“Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple.”

Which can be translated to something like, for example, this:

hidding the User’s Library folder, does not make it any more simple, it just removes some possible “clutter” but that’s not any more simpler, in fact it’s even more complicated because now the user has absolutely no idea of what to do or where to go when he wants to or needs to fix some program default settings, install fonts, copy his email folders, etc etc.

It’s essentially like welding your car’s bonnet. (( hood for you americans. My english-as-language education was with a british BBC-english speaking teacher. )) Yes, you avoid the “clutter” of another lock and the nuisance of another lever in your cockpit, but that seriously doesn’t make it’s usage or maintenance any more simpler than it was before.

Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services

CUPERTINO, California—October 29, 2012—Apple® today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

“We are in one of the most prolific periods of innovation and new products in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The amazing products that we’ve introduced in September and October, iPhone 5, iOS 6, iPad mini, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPod nano and many of our applications, could only have been created at Apple and are the direct result of our relentless focus on tightly integrating world-class hardware, software and services.”

Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. His incredible design aesthetic has been the driving force behind the look and feel of Apple’s products for more than a decade.

Apple Press Info

Two quick thoughts:

  1. Tim Cook is temporarily my new hero! (( for a very brief moment. I haven’t forgot all the latest disappointments with Apple’s line of products. ))

  2. I think I’ve just decided to completely avoid Lion & Mountain Lion OS X and just try to wait for Sir Ive’s cleaned up version of Mac OS X. Snow Leopard until 2013’s Summer?

Zig

As to the iPhone 5, the build quality I’ve seen is top-notch (both black and white alike), and after the first few minutes of thinking “boy, this thing doesn’t really fit in my hand”, that feeling tuned out. Still, while grabbing it off a desk to test a few things I kept finding it subtly off — like an unshaven Buddhist monk.

Truth be told that I’ve handled a number of “larger” phones recently, and those felt odder — unshaven Buddhist monk wearing fuchsia robes kind of odd, just about — and I dislike anything that won’t fit into a trouser pocket and stay there.

The Tao of Mac

Haven’t seen one in real life yet, but seriously i hate what i have read and seen about it. Apple seems to have forgot a simple truth in what regards to customers. Don’t force annoying changes in to stuff if there isn’t a clear benefit worthy of the hassle.

We changed the screen size (annoyed the developers), the actual physical proportions (annoyed the customers and case makers) & the connector (royally annoyed anyone that already had some hardware prepared for the old 30 pin connector), all this for getting a ligher “tv remote” shaped phone. Which is like 30 grams lighter or something. Hurray.

Doesn’t make sense. I would buy an “old” iPhone 4 or 4S instead of a iPhonr 5 any day. Too much drawbacks, not enough advantages.

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.

Compete Report: Apple iOS 6

One weird thing about iOS 6 is that Apple’s built-in apps are suddenly even more inconsistently designed than ever. Some apps, like Safari and Settings, retain the old blue-gray look and feel, while others are dark gray with black accents (Photos, iTunes, App Store) or just dark gray, light gray with dark gray accents (Music), a new bluer-gray (Videos), or faux-wood (iTunes U and Newsstand, both of which—seriously—feature differently colored wood designs!). I await someone’s impassioned defense of this Crayola strategy.

iOS Inconsistencies in interface

If you are using an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, iOS 6 is of course a necessary upgrade, even with the Maps silliness. Looked at from the outside, however, there’s not much here that’s worth fretting over. If you’re using Windows Phone or Android, you can at least rest easy knowing that only Apple’s devices are truly lust-worthy, and then only until you bring them out in the real world and scratch them or break the screen, which is especially a problem for iPhones. But the iOS software that runs on these devices is showing its age. And Apple shows no indication that it’s ever going change that from strategy. This is a big opportunity for the competition.

Paul Thurrott – WinSupersite

Couldn’t agree more. Apple should really take a break, and decide where it’s going in the interface area. And then do a full house cleaning, both on iOS and Mac OS X. This mess is ridiculous and seriously makes me doubt of what will be Apple’s future. I intend to use my Macbook another couple of years, easily. But when I finally need a replacement, will Mac OS X still be the incredibly usable and clean OS that I “fell in love” with?

A couple of years of ago, even though I seriously hated some of Apple’s idiosyncrasies, I wouldn’t have any doubts that my next computer would be an Apple too. Since Lion, with its unusable Versions and Mission Control and the whole skeumorphism aura and iOSification, joined by iOS own compound of mistakes and silly restrictions, and, of course, the cherry on top was Snow Leopard’s lack of iCloud integration and iOS sync, I’ve started seriously worrying about my next computer.

Now i’m not so sure that it will be a Mac. Whenever i have the option of spending money on some software i wonder if I will still be able to use it on my next computer. The question is, what could it be? And for that, there’s still no good answer. For now, Apple and Mac OS X continue to be the best answers. But i worry about the future, if those diverging currents inside Apple are not resolved and forced to fit together. Apple should figure out what it wants to produce, for whom it is producing it and then clean house. You can’t continue to market a “productivity advanced” OS (as Mac OS) and then just dumb it down to the unusability of versions, or iCloud Sync.

Mountain Lion without skeuomorphism

I’ll try to keep it simple. I do not like skeuomorphism at all. It kinda makes sense and works on iOS, because you actually hold the device and touch with your fingers, but whyyyyy on the Mac… hate it. So I had nothing to do and took scissors and brush and pulled the damn leather off my Mac running Mountain Lion. I shared this for a friendly discussion about skeuomorphism and how does it improve anything?

Let’s call this an experiment about how the ML would look without skeuomorphism crap.

The Verge Forums

Notes editor without skeumorphism

It looks so… Usable! I’m seriously worried about the direction Apple is taking with Mac OS X (( yes, i still call it by its name, Mac OS X! )) and just looking at this experiment makes me understand and have a better feel of why i loathe the current appearance and working of some of Apple’s recent apps.

The worst thing about it is that it feels like Jekyll and Hyde. There’s effectively two Apples. I fell in love by the clean, minimalistic one and now i’m afraid i will have to endure the ugly, excessive, noveau-riche silly one. I’m still on Snow Leopard very much (also) due to this. Maybe i will update to Mountain Lion but seriously, i’m waiting. And hoping desperately that by 10.9 Apple and Mac OS X will get back on track.

But i make no idle threats. Because, unfortunately, there’s no other option out there. And that just makes me sad.