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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.
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.
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.
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.
Two quick thoughts:
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. ))
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?
Ouch!!
I haven’t tried the new Ubuntu, but i must say that my brief experiment with Ubuntu 12.04 was a quite surprising event. Actually seemed quite good regarding usability and coherence. As soon as i can, i think i will try it out more thoroughly, it definitely seems to have the potential to be a capable Mac OS X replacement for most folks / standard “PCs”.
Google, please stop doing that. I’d actually love it if you took features out of Chrome and brought it back to the original, clean builds that were fast as fuck. That’s all I care about in a web browser.
Instead, we’re at the point now where I cannot shut down my computer without force-quitting Chrome. And the browser is just about the only thing that can get my brand-new MacBook Pro to beachball.
I know it’s a crazy concept in the age of fast iteration on the web, but what if you just stop development on Chrome from a feature perspective? Continue to speed up and refine the JavaScript engine and underlying tech, but keep the browser itself as minimal as possible.
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.
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.
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).”
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.
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.
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.
My previous password has been around 30 chars in size and now, it doesn’t work anymore. However, I could login by typing just the first 16 chars.
This limitation is well known (see Graham Cluley’s excellent post on the password limits of various services) however, what caught my attention was that by cutting the password to 16 chars, it would work.
To pull this trick with older passwords, Microsoft had two choices:
* store full plaintext passwords in their db; compare the first 16 chars only * calculate the hash only on the first 16; ignore the rest
Storing plaintext passwords for online services is a definite no-no in security. The other choice could mean that since its inception, Hotmail was silently using only the first 16 chars of the password.
To be honest, I’m not sure which one is worse.
Microsoft: Screwing up security and best-practices since, basically, ever!
I assume there’s nothing wrong with the water up there in Redmond, so why do MS keeps doing this kind of stupid things and just not giving an jota about security? Or Standards? Or just good engineering?
Another good example is this one:
@bphogan: Example of NIH: Microsoft PowerShell: “New-item foo.txt -type file” instead of ” touch foo.txt”
Microsoft could just have implemented some sort of POSIX compliant shell (( bash, zshell, and endless others )) all freely available, all standards compliant and all widely used in every other OS in the world. Instead they have to go and reinvent the wheel and do some half-baked effort, that probably is way more limited, way more insecure and always halfway but never there.
Update: To answer the original poster, apparently is the last one, MS has always only stored the first 16 characters of your password and simply ignored all the remaining ones.
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.
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.
