While everyone discusses the forstallless (is that a word?) future of Apple, I’m curious about Forstall’s own future. According to “sources”, Scott Forstall is a pain in the ass and many people at Apple didn’t want to even talk to him. Will someone hire him or will he start his own thing? Tony Fadell looks happy making thermostats, what will Scott’s thing be?
Marco Arment’s brilliant The Magazine is only available on iOS 6. Unfortunately it’s doesn’t work on the original iPad which I still use, so I’ve subscribed to The Magazine on my iPhone 4. But I don’t like reading anything longer than an SMS from the phone’s screen. So how do I read The Magazine of the iPad?
I just open The Magazine on the iPhone and send articles I want to read to Instapaper (Instapaper works on iOS 5).
At first I thought that the “Send to Instapaper” button in The Magazine was dumb. Why would I want to save something for offline reading if I already have it available offline in a readable format? Well, now I know: because I want to read it on my iPad. And since The Magazine is about text and not some impossible UI and crazy animation effects which have plagued Newsstand publications, I don’t lose anything by reading it in Instapaper format.
By the way, I fully support Marco’s decision to drop support for earlier iOS versions in The Magazine. I think it will benefit the majority of his customers: by using advanced APIs and better hardware he’ll be able to spend less time optimizing and testing stuff, and more time on great features.
It’s always a pleasure to talk to Kostya Gorsky, lead designer from Yandex and my good friend.
We’ve been discussing the future of browsers, apps and the Internet lately and have formed a vision of how all this stuff should work. I’ve been convinced that the address bar is not necessary and will die some day, and that there won’t be any meaningful difference between apps and websites. This simplification raises some questions and causes some problems at first, but they are all technical. People won’t care. We can make it.
Today one can find a site with Google from the Spotlight page on an iPad and add it to their home screen — all without knowing anything about web addresses. Even if you can explain the difference between an app and a website to your grandpa, this will not be of any value to him. Why bother, it’s all just coloured rectangles.
Kostya have recapped it all well: “You should have a screen with the coloured rectangles and a way to add them to it”.
And so I’ve coined a new design for iPad’s home screen. See the App Store icon. Before:
After:
Of course, manual updates will die, too.
We’ve went into much more detail with this, having talked for about an hour. And I wanted to publish this picture.
Life does not present you with a choice to be or not to be a designer.
Everyone always has to make design decisions. There’s no escape: whatever you do, other people will interact with your product or service. Your design decisions can be good or bad, but they cannot not exist. You have to make them, or you are stuck.
To make these decisions, you have to be competent. That’s why design is a basic discipline, as language is. Saying you don’t want to learn design is like saying you don’t want to learn to write. It’s bullshit. Kids should start learning design in primary school: it’s for everyone.
You can’t just make crap and say “hey, I’m not a designer”. There’s no such thing as “not a designer”. If you make crap, you’re just a crappy designer. Fix it.
As I’m sure many designers do, I have an Assets folder with a collection of small things you always need (mouse cursors, spinners, checkboxes etc.). There’s one thing that’s so easy to create from scratch that I don’t even bother to store it anywhere.
Let’s say you want to add a popup calendar to a date input. Here’s how you make a calendar icon for it.
Start with a 4×4 black rectangle (showing at 1200% zoom):
Make three of them in a row, with overlapping borders, like this:
Clone this whole thing and move 3 pixels down, like this:
Now clone this whole thing and move 3 pixels down and 3 pixels to the left, like this:
Done (don’t try to click, it’s just a picture):
This is great, especially today (from Idioteka):
The text says:
Attention! A Samsung iPhone has been found in the school. Refer to the educational director U. V. Kuznetsova.
Should Apple use this as an extra evidence?
Ben Brown asks if it is time for password-less login. Well, yes it is. It’s actually long been.
I think an even better solution would be to remove the password completely, allowing users to login with only an email address. Each time a user needs to login, they enter their email address and receive a login link via email.
That’s part of our usual process of removing mandatory signup. We try to convince all our clients to do this (see also: Interface is Evil). The thinking goes: password is not really needed to sign in: you can always click the “I forgot” link. So why not just assume that the user has forgotten their password?
This flip makes sense for almost every website. If users visit a site infrequently, signing in via email is not a big deal. If users visit a site regularly, then chances are high that they are already signed in and won’t see the form anyway.
In Bureausphere (it’s a kind of online designers club available only in Russian), we go even further. There’s no sign in or sign out at all. On the “me” page, if we haven’t recognized the user by cookies, we just ask for an email (I’ve translated this bit for this screenshot):
If we know this user, we just send a link to their page, and the link logs them in behind the scenes. There’s no way to log out. And if we don’t know the person, we still do the same: the page will be created on the fly as the user clicks the link in the e-mail.
There is one problem with this approach. While no user likes messing with passwords, people at least understand how the system works. So if we change it, even for the better, we must take into account that some users will be confused.
What else?
John Siracusa in the review:
Creating a new document and then immediately closing without saving now shows a dialog box whose far-left button is labeled “Delete” rather than the milder “Don’t Save”. The same button in the dialog that appears after selecting the “Duplicate…” command and then immediately closing the duplicate window is now labeled “Delete Copy” instead of “Don’t Save”.
Nice touch.
There are two stupid windows on a Mac that annoy the hell out of me.
This one appears on my main machine in a couple of minutes after I close the lid of my notebook:
It tells me that the remote volumes are no longer available, which I well know and don’t give a shit about. What am I supposed to do with this information? If I were using the volumes in any way, like copying a file, I would have noticed the problem long ago (as the file would stop copying, obviously).
Additionally, it has two buttons that do exactly the same thing: nothing. No matter what I press, the volumes are no longer available and I can’t do anything about it. What do you mean “Disconnect All”, it’s been disconnected several minutes ago, and we both know it. This window should be killed.
This second one appears one in ten times when I change something in iCal:
Now what is that? Not only are they dumping some cryptic server messages onto me, they are also presenting me with a choice. What am I supposed to do here? I don’t want to go offline, because why would I, and I don’t want to “Revert to Server” because I have no idea what it means.
“Revert to Server” is the default one, so it feels like it’s safe to choose it, but I’ve learned that it actually undoes my latest change. There’s no excuse for that: I’ve made my change for reason. Why would you even offer me the choice to undo it, let alone make it the default one? And “Go Offline” actually saves my edit and syncs it to iCloud (when it’s in a better mood later). Someone in iCal department should read Raskin and learn that user’s input is priceless, and it should always be saved by default.
Just change the button names to “Save and sync when possible” and “Forget what I’ve just done”, and it would be ridiculously obvious that this window, too, is useless and should be removed.
