“One day, somebody will catch us napping…”
“One day, somebody will catch us napping,” writes Bill Gates in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999). “One day, an eager upstart will put Microsoft out of business.”
He almost got it right. The guy who caught them napping was certainly very eager and was an upstart in his time, but not that young.
This is the “Welcome” message at Apple.
Powerful. Very, very powerful.
Source: asimpleguyblog.blogspot.in
This. This is why I love OS X and the Apple ecosystem with its products, users, developers, engineers and designers - insane attention to detail from end to end, starting from Apple all the way up at the top down to the lowly one-man and two-man teams making OS X apps. Computing the way it should be.
Pixelmator - The eyedropper tool shows you what color you picked inside the pipette.
/via Michiel
Source: littlebigdetails
Disruptive
Yep, the biggest reason I wanted Apple to succeed back in 2007 was because I wanted someone to show the world that leapfrogging the competition with insanely great products is a much better and more profitable business strategy than the mindless cloning that the PC industry has been doing all along.
But… instead of Apple’s success spawning a 1000 Apples as I had so dearly hoped, it spawned the same 1000 leeches of the PC industry sucking on the efforts of the pioneer. I don’t care about these parasites and their “me too” products. They are impotent, they have no life and it’s stupid to expect them to do anything worth getting excited about.
But I do keep hoping that someday the leeches realize they are copying the wrong thing - that they’re copying Apple’s products when they should be copying Apple’s fundamentals, which is to make great products that redefine the landscape of the industry.
Samsung, Sony, LG, Motorola et al should pick up little known research projects that have the potential to change the way we do things today, polish them, build a cohesive business strategy around them, plan a great ecosystem supporting them and do a scalable product launch driving mass market adoption. I don’t want another iPad clone. What I do want is Augmented Reality (SixthSense), Thought Computing and Space elevators. Whoever does that gets to be next in line to suck money out of my wallet.
You should know by now that I normally do not get into much “news” around here. Especially when it’s not specifically Mac news. There are a ton of great Mac news sites out there and I leave that job up to them. That said, Chairman Gruber linked to a highly fascinating Wall Street Journal…
Source: minimalmac
What a revolution looks like
Absolutely amazing.
To start the original PC revolution and follow that up with the digital music, smartphone and tablet revolutions, Apple is truly the greatest company mankind has ever known.
And to get to see this ‘phenomenon’ unfold right in front of us… we are all the luckiest bastards ever.
[Graph from the inimitable asymco]
Gyrotasking
Gyrotasking is an idea I had last year for a better way to switch between apps running on your iPhone. The current way to switch apps is to double-tap the home button, bring up the multitasking bar, scroll through and search the ‘icon soup’ for the icon of the app you want to switch to, and then click on the icon.
But it doesn’t have to be this tedious if we make use of the gyroscope that every iPhone 4 (and above) ships with. This is the base for my idea - Gyrotasking.
Gyrotasking lets you switch apps by simply pressing the home button and then moving/rotating the iPhone physically around you and depending on how much your arm/iPhone rotates around you, the apps start switching in sequence.
Here’s an interactive flash widget I made to demo the idea - simply press and hold the home button in the demo below with your mouse and move your mouse left/right to switch between open apps. It’s one, simple fluid motion to switch between apps instead of the present “double-tap, scroll through and search for app icon you want to switch to, then tap on that icon” flow.
I did this file sometime about the middle of last year and Apple has since updated the switching transitions so if you see that the switching animation in my flash demo doesn’t look exactly the way it does on your iPhone, this is why. The file is also a bit too wide but I don’t have the time to edit it back down to a more compact res.
While doing this on an iPhone mockup on your desktop using a mouse is clumsy, you can get a real world feel for it very easily. Simply hold up your iPhone, press and hold the home button and swing your iPhone left and right slowly while imagining the apps switching, like in the demo above - ain’t that sweet?
Grab a chair, as the buttons are here to tell their story
One of the things about closely following software UI changes is that, over time, they can give you hints about the thinking and planning that goes behind-the-scenes. As a UI enthusiast, I’ve been doing this for a long time and when I saw the latest Mac OS X Lion screenshots, it got me thinking and here is my theory…
The graphic says it all - as OS X gains market share and continues to want to gain market share, its target is now set squarely on the mainstream audience and as you can see from the graphic, OS X progress is now tracking the same paths Windows is - “great for none but good enough for everyone”.
For someone who first started up Photoshop 8 years ago, to complete that tutorial on “How to make Mac OS X style Aqua-esque pill buttons”, OS X Lion is a huge letdown.
The buttons have told us their story, a story about great fame and fortune. But when the story ends, only sadness lingers in its wake.
It’s time desktops caught up with smartphone innovations, starting with ‘Editable selections’
If you look at the iPhone above (image via taptaptap)**, you’ll see a now familiar sight - a blob of selected text. But what I want to focus on, is something so subtle that we take it for granted, but is in fact highly useful and interesting - the edit handles at the ends of the selection.
We’ve been selecting stuff on our desktop machines for decades now, but after using my iPhone and getting used to the edit handles that iOS provides for selections, I’m amazed why no one has ever thought of bringing this highly useful feature to the desktop. Think of all those times when you had to cancel a selection and start over again. Now imagine if you had the ability to edit your selections all along - saves clicks, time and you from frustration.
Apple is already working to carry over iOS innovations ‘Back to the Mac’ with the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. I just wish there was a way to add my ‘Editable selections’ feature request to the innovations they’ve already added in like Launchpad, Folders, Full-screen apps, and Auto-save.
If only Steve read this blog.
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** An easier way to select an entire paragraph is to simply do a two-fingered swipe down gesture, over the paragraph you want to select. Tapping four times is insane.
Why every PC manufacturer wishes they ‘lost’ like Apple
As makers of products that change the world and re-invent entire industries , Apple deserve their ‘loss’.
Never enjoyed a gadget ad like I did when I watched this one. Voiced by Peter Coyote and set to Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Gold Lion instrumental, this is one heck of a job from Apple’s TBWA\Chiat\Day Media Arts lab.
Boy would I love to see Apple do more ads like this instead of the usual jinglebell-ish ones.
