The point is that we, he, and Jobs would pick our preferred software on an inferior hardware device over our preferred hardware running inferior software, not the particulars of the choice.
3,751 karma · joined March 3, 2010
siglesias.com
Betting it's him.
"No options for lower Res screen, so this app isn't an option for me."
"Has potential, but doesn't resize for smaller screens, so can't see half of what's going on. Interface is snappy though, which is good."
"screen resolution issues: Doesn't display properly on my Samsung Galaxy Ace. Hope you can fix this. Otherwise, quite an interesting app."
"My phone screen is too small for this app"
Along with a slew of other problems with bugginess, lack of feature parity with iOS, etc. Telling is the variance of its score (http://cl.ly/0m3b2a2v3s1Y0x071Q0e) versus iOS (http://cl.ly/030I0M3z1I181g3T2p2T), suggesting that the Path developers have this product working well on some phones, but terribly on others. That's one of the clearest examples of fragmentation that I can find.
Swiping doesn't work, nor are clues provided in detail view. The answer is that the delete button is hidden inside the Smiley Face/Like button, which was not intuitive to me. After all, if I want to delete a post I obviously don't like it and won't think to look there. As a caveat to what this article says, it would be better for swipe to be reappropriated to the expected behavior. This is going to be more of an issue if more apps adopt under-tableview navigation.
That's a picture I took at a Sam's Club a couple of days ago. If you guys really think that this form factor is the be-all-end-all for tablet design, you're seriously, seriously deceiving yourselves. If you've spent any amount of time thinking critically about the differences between various forms of art--different buildings, different authors, different paintings, different sculptures--then you know there is such a thing as style that seems perfect locally but distinct globally. The argument is "how could it be otherwise?" But buildings haven't converged on one material, one look. Paintings are absolutely distinguishable between painters. Books are absolutely distinguishable between authors, even those with minimalist writing styles. Why? Because the works of art that make history are originals, not replicas [1].
Apple chose minimalism, and everybody acts like that is the only style available. It isn't. I'd love to see a circular tablet. I'd love to see a computer aesthetic that is absolutely embellished and ornamented. Might be cool and benefit me as a consumer. Let's please move away from this insistence that it can't be otherwise. It can.
[1] don't be pedantic
Jobs understood the division of responsibility between Apple, with its extremely limited resources, and its developer community. What wasn't core to selling computers was cut. We are talking about a company that was 90 days from bankruptcy when he took over. I think he made a good decision.
If somebody has wanted to do a proper visual programming environment in the vein of HyperCard for the Mac, what in the last 13 years has stopped them? It wasn't Jobs.
Practically speaking, I don't see that as having changed in Apple. They still see the gateway to creativity and self expression being ease of use, as opposed to some other values such as hardware compatibility or UI customizability.
I'd personally prefer a competitive landscape where players do what Harris's team did at Microsoft or what Palm did with WebOS, which is to make it their own. Tiles instead of icons. Cards for switching and closing apps instead of iOS's in and out. Big players who copy are bad for innovation, not good for it.
If you look at the Objectified interview, along with nearly every promotional video that Apple puts out, it's very clear that Ive is the design guy.
Android and Siri. Android does well, yes, but Google's financial success has not yet been shown to be correlated with Android shipments (look at the stock performance over the last two years for evidence). In some interesting instances competitors (Baidu and Amazon) have gutted Android to be used against them. Every query that is performed on Siri is routed to services that are NOT search, which is where Google makes its money. Why Google would invest money in implementing mobile services that route computing away from the web is beyond me. It isn't in their interest. Joe Hewitt made this observation before too. So while yes, Google might be technically capable of adding voice assistant, it isn't clear how that leads to increased profits for them. Feature parity is the wrong way to think about the Apple Google relationship.
There is a considerable amount of thought that goes into how a product is packaged an unpackaged. It is extraordinarily disingenuous to claim that all that is being copied here is "putting the damn product in the damn box." I can think of approximately 20-30 ways that a tablet can be packaged (and surely you've opened just as many products in your life time), and a five-sided cover revealing just the product is only one of them.
It's a common theme emerging on HN that these trademark disputes constitute "obvious" design choices. It bears mentioning that it is possible to verify the solution of an NP problem in P time. That doesn't make the solution obvious.