dieterrams

> Their iPod touches have this really slick, polished metal back. It looks really great – for a few weeks. Then it’s quickly getting scratches.

Likewise for the chrome bezel. Within an hour of ditching my iPhone's case, I nicked the damn thing with a very slight bump. It was a huge relief to see Apple lose the chrome for the iPhone 4. But after one of Engadget's phones got a nice big scratch on the back, I can no longer assume they're using gorilla glass on both sides.

I'm forced to believe they make questionable material choices merely to increase the "shiny", which is one of my main gripes with Apple. It's undoubtedly why they use glossy displays by default on MacBooks, iMacs, and iPads, even though matte is far more usable.

Change how you hold the phone. Not that big of a deal.

But in typical TC linkbait fashion, they were fully aware that referencing "The Kindle" would immediately make people think of Kindle the device. Nobody refers to the software that way.

"As longtime readers know, I think the cellphone industry is one step away from a big-city mugger."

I think they're worse. You at least know what you're getting into with a mugger. The carriers, however, are all about hiding information, causing unintended charges and profiting off their customers' lack of 24/7 vigilance, and manipulating you with crazy pricing plans. It astonishes me that this industry isn't better regulated (in the US), or given effective incentives to behave like good citizens.

It's a real shame that with companies like these, the engineers who actually do the work of adding value are not the ones driving these companies. Instead, it's some jerk in a suit whose job is to figure out how to use their leverage to wring more money out of people.

If you have a developer account, you can watch the WWDC videos introducing Xcode 4 for yourself. Honestly, these videos consistently impressed me far more than the iPhone 4 keynote.

Blatant misinformation. At the beginning of this article, they suggest Google is going to impose a single UI, as though Sense and Motoblur would no longer be allowed. By the end, they acknowledge that they're only hoping to make the default UI so good that it discourages other manufacturers from rolling their own, which we already knew. Terribly, if not manipulatively written.

It wouldn't surprise me if the sort of code you're writing is boring. A lot of website dev is.

Programming doesn't become fun (or at least obsessively involving) until you start working on something that's challenging to architect well, optimize, or code elegantly. If the functionality is inherently interesting, that helps, too.

Chances are that your programming education (which I'm assuming was self-taught) lacked a teacher that introduced you to interesting challenges of architecture, optimization, and elegance. In other words, showed you how programming can be a highly intellectual activity. I recommend working through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs while watching accompanying lectures and doing exercises. It's as good an intellectual introduction to programming as you can get.

The problem with circular menus comes down to limited choices (as you pointed out), and the simple fact that it's difficult to read a circular menu. They will work best when the choices are adequately represented by an icon or single word, the choices are hierarchically flat (no drilling through submenus), and when the menu is accessed so frequently that the user can quickly map those choices to muscle memory.* Outside of these conditions, they don't work so well, because their advantages in terms of Fitts' law are greatly outweighed by their lack of readability. Unfortunately a "rings" system would only exacerbate that.

* A circular menu is also especially good if there's some natural mapping between the choices and a circular layout, like choosing a compass direction.

> Imagine, if you will, that Motorola just introduced their latest Android device, front-facing camera and all, called the iDroid. The iDroid comes with an easy to use, ultra-simple video conferencing solution, but it only works on wifi, and it only works between iDroid devices.

How, I ask, would John Gruber respond to that? Imagine that it's been tightly polished and all.

Would he post a praise-filled entry lauding their innovation, heralding this great new functionality? Maybe I'm just being a jerk, but I think he would viciously attack it.

----------

I love how you're using a hypothetical scenario in which Gruber would very plausibly praise the implementation in question in order to undermine his credibility. He has often pointed out when a competitor does something better than Apple does, or otherwise markedly improves on the status quo.

All you've done is create a gestalt which people who don't know any better will interpret according to their biases. Talk about arguments that don't bear any scrutiny.

I agree with you. I don't think this thing is going to take off as a mainstream transportation device. I just think it's less awkward than the Segway.

> [citation needed]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg

> got anything non-anecdotal that speaks to this, or at least a (neutral) third-party authority on UX?

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone-vs-...

http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+android+customer+satis...

U.S. iPhone users have the highest customer satisfaction, despite having greater dissatisfaction with their carrier, AT&T, which is responsible for a pretty big portion of a phone user's experience.

I actually think that it's better than the Segway for making you slightly shorter. One of the problems with the Segway is that the increased height (and width) makes you so conspicuous as to practically be flaunting your use of it, and how independent you are from the lowly ambulating masses.

Whereas someone riding a Vespa can still come off as cool. (Though they'll immediately look silly next to someone on a Harley.)

Really? I think it makes you look less smug. It doesn't make you effectively taller the way Segway does, and sitting is a more casual position.

I think the people in this video look smug, for various reasons unrelated to the U3-X itself.

Definitely. Steve wouldn't be the kind of guy to get angry over this if he wasn't so passionate about building a better product. I imagine he's just as angry that the Android UI is basically a second-rate knockoff. (Sorry if this makes some people angry.) If Google had developed a UI derivative of, but also indisputably better than iPhone OS's, Jobs would have respected them for it.

I guess it's not at all clear from my comment, but I agree with lionhearted insofar as his description of Apple's (or Steve's) motives are basically right. I'm not sure if I agree with their method of retaliation (blocking AdMob from targeting), but I do think they're justified in feeling angry about having their UI innovations ripped off. They don't get to hold onto them forever, but when their work advances the industry by that much, they deserve a level of deference, the same way deserving patent-holders do.

Funnily enough, it's Microsoft that chose not to develop a derivative UI this time, with Windows Phone 7. Something tells me that that UI is going to get old fast, but at least they attempted to innovate and be original.

I agree with this, but instead of saying Apple gets angry, we might as well acknowledge that it's basically Steve who gets angry. These things are sort of his babies, after all, and he takes it personal. But you know, if you'd put a lot of effort into honing an interface light years ahead of the competition, and someone you saw as a friend/ally/colleague suddenly decided to ape that UI without having put in any of the work, you'd probably take it personal too.

> You say that peripheral vision is more impairing than lack of binocular disparity. But peripheral vision has zero impact on depth perception

Ah, but he didn't say "more impairing with respect to depth perception." He was talking about impairment in general. As in, the loss of peripheral vision that comes with having only one eye is probably a bigger deal than the loss of binocular depth perception that comes with having only one eye, because binocular depth perception doesn't confer that much of a perceptual advantage over the ability to process motion parallax.

That last part is certainly debatable, and really depends on the context. Your tennis example brings to mind the fact that binocular depth perception is really helpful for hunters (of many species), presumably because it gives them more precise depth information with less orthogonal movement. Wider peripheral vision is probably better for avoiding predators and other dangers. (I was just reading about animals with binocular 360 degree vision, after wondering why 360 degree vision wasn't more prevalent.)

For a modern human, which sort of visual impairment is more impairing likely depends a lot on lifestyle and environment.

As kemiller said, this is likely about Apple wanting developers to use iOS4's built-in support for regular expressions, which, by the way, gives you the answer to your submission's title. Please edit it accordingly.

RegexKitLite, not regex. Way to get this wrong.

> Ah yes, implied nudity. You know, like clothes. ;)

Ha, yes. Well, you know what I meant. Not to be confused with I know it when I see it. :)

Nope. If you'd read the second page of the OP, you'd realize this was exactly the comic that Apple did not directly review.

I'm not defending this policy or suggesting that it makes any sense given how easy it is to find nudity (or sexual acts, etc.) elsewhere. It doesn't. But the writer has simply failed to present any compelling evidence that this censorship was about homosexuality. Given that there's an established policy against nudity and not homosexuality, it makes more sense to consider the former as the determinative criteria, doesn't it? Apps get rejected merely for showing women in bathing suits.

There is one panel in the comic which does not contain any explicit or implied nudity that's censored, but which is still obviously sexual. I've no idea if blacking this panel out was Apple's idea and is consistent with other policies, or if the creators just decided to play it safe. And Apple's content regulation policies have never been consistently enforced, subject to individual reviewers' interpretations of what's kosher. (A particularly good reason why they should drop this process.)

Apple deserves much legitimate criticism over content regulation, but this article isn't an example of that.

Before people work themselves into self-righteous fury (too late) about how authoritarian Apple is censoring homosexuality and promoting a culture of homophobia, you need to understand that this is about no-nudity, a policy the article's writer knows full well about already, seeing as how he wrote a previous article about it and linked to it.

As davidedicillo pointed out, he attempts to work this into an anti-gay angle by pointing out how a comic book not directly reviewed by Apple (it is downloadable through a comic store app) containing more explicit heterosex was not similarly censored, which is about as airtight an analysis as you might expect from Fox News. He literally has nothing else to base his anti-homosexual conclusions on.

I do think Apple is fundamentally misguided in its attempts to regulate content, and they're only going to dig themselves into a deeper hole by doing anything beyond adopting ratings and age blockers. But unfortunately this article is a yet another example of anti-Apple hysteria fueled sensationalism.

  Your definition of trade-off seems broken. If I can make a car much bigger,
  or make it much more fuel efficient then that's still a trade-off even if I
  decide to make it a little bit bigger and a little bit more fuel efficient.

There's nothing wrong with my definition of a trade-off. What you're pointing out here is that all design inherently involves trade-offs, which is just a simple fact. Your previous post, however, makes the FUDdy suggestion that people are going to get something worse than before ("I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life etc.")

I guess it's possible that when you talked about "less light" and "less battery life", you were speaking in reference to theoretical maximums which Apple could have chosen to individually pursue at the expense of all other factors, as opposed to the display quality and battery life of existing phones. In which case, you were simply stating a practical fact and not offering a criticism. But it sure doesn't sound that way.

  They are of course making lemonade from this particular lemon via marketing
  in an attempt to counteract the benefit that rivals will receive by choosing
  the screen with the best balance of quality/price/battery at any particular
  point in time for their devices.

Where and what are those devices?

  let's shout this metric from the rooftops because as any longtime Apple
  follower (like myself) knows, it's only "about the total experience" when
  you can't actually beat them on the raw figures.

You'll notice Apple continues to emphasize the experience here, which is why they bothered to talk about human optics rather than simply dumping the 326 ppi figure and moving on. And sure, they like to brag about specs when they can, but it's the fact that they're fundamentally about the total experience that gives them the highest customer satisfaction ratings.

  If you happen to be forced to use a spec that by your own marketing is higher
  than actually necessary or visible most of the time, then that figure becomes
  vitally important since no-one even wants to match it because they want to
  focus on the "total experience" rather than chase your metric.

Nobody was forced to do anything. 960x640 was a particularly convenient choice for two reasons: it allowed them to have maximally sharp text and images, while sidestepping problems that arise with scaling apps for previous devices by non-integer values.

> (Also, I'd love to find reviews of critics about the "squared, industrial" design on the Droid and their opinions on the "squared, industrial" designed iPhone. But I digress.)

I think you might be confusing an industrial look with industrial design. The latter is a practice, not a style.

The Droid has a more squared, industrial look. iPhone 4 has a more squared industrial design relative to its predecessors, but not so much an industrial look.

> My eye doesn't have a zoom. I see things at their actual size and even holding my phone right up to my eye I can't get it as large as those images. Details that I can't see without artificial zoom are the same as details that I can't see period.

They're zoomed because it's the only way to demonstrate the difference when the display you're looking at almost certainly has a lower PPI. It's no different from having to zoom in on a print sample to show how clear a printer's text is on a monitor.

> Clearly, higher resolutions up to some point are better for display purposes, but there's tradeoffs involved. I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life, etc.

Which makes it all the more impressive that iPhone 4 has four times the contrast ratio and better battery life than previous iPhones, with the speed of an iPad, in a physically smaller space. Given that everything has been improved, it's clearly not much of a tradeoff.

FYI, iOS is perfectly capable of running applications designed for other resolutions. It's not for lack of 'flexibility' on the operating system's part that Apple chose not to utilize intermediate resolutions for its hardware.

It's also a little strange to see Android phones' variety of resolutions being described as some sort of path that Android has trailblazed. For one thing, the operating system has nothing to do with it, and for another, that sort of thing has been standard practice for a long time now, whether you're considering computers in general or even just mobile handsets.

What amuses me is how threatened people can get by a photo of a phone, that they have to start insulting people for their appreciation of it.

Still with the downvotes. Not that I care about losing points, but how badly does it reflect on you when you downvote someone for presenting a fact?

I don't think you quite got it. Only mobile advertisers who also compete with Apple on devices and OSes are affected. This does not make all competitors "kneecapped".

Edit: Really? I'm getting downvoted for this? Gruber's point that Apple's critics won't let facts get in their way gets proven once again.

Yeah, I know what sarcasm is. Famously known as being difficult to communicate on the Internet. You might want to read up on that.

It's only obvious this is sarcasm after reading the last line of the OP. Without that context, it's indistinguishable from the petty complaints around here. Therefore, misdirected anger remains. Rargh.

I also don't think the OP is making a petty complaint (even if it probably got upvoted for petty reasons), as the representation IS potentially misleading, despite there being good reasons for it.

What on earth are you expecting? Should Apple load pictures of your friends off Facebook or Flickr?

Models used in advertising have always been more attractive on average. Even the comparatively unattractive models are more photogenic on average. And what does this have to do with the topic?

Stop cluttering HN with petty complaints about Apple.