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Apple is Really Bad At Design (theoutline.com)
Joshua Topolsky, writing for the Outline: Once upon a time, Apple could do little wrong. As one of the first mainstream computer companies to equally value design and technical simplicity, it upended our expectations about what PCs could be. "Macintosh works the way people work," read one 1992 ad. Rather than requiring downloads and installations and extra memory to get things right (as often required by Windows machines), Apple made it so you could just plug in a mouse or start up a program and it would just... work. Marrying that functionality with the groundbreaking design the company has embodied since the early Macs, it's easy to see how Apple became the darling of designers, artists, and the rest of the creative class. The work was downright elegant; unheard of for an electronics company. [...] But things changed. In 2013 I wrote about the confusing and visually abrasive turn Apple had made with the introduction of iOS 7, the operating system refresh that would set the stage for almost all of Apple's recent design. The product, the first piece of software overseen by Jony Ive, was confusing, amateur, and relatively unfinished upon launch. [...] It's almost as if the company is being buried under the weight of its products. Unable to cut ties with past concepts (for instance, the abomination that is iTunes), unable to choose clear paths forward (USB-C or Lightning guys?), compromising core elements to make room for splashy features, and executing haphazardly to solve long-term issues. [...] Pundits will respond to these arguments by detailing Apple's meteoric and sustained market-value gains. Apple fans will shout justifications for a stylus that must be charged by sticking it into the bottom of an iPad, a "back" button jammed weirdly into the status bar, a system of dongles for connecting oft-used devices, a notch that rudely juts into the display of a $1,000 phone. But the reality is that for all the phones Apple sells and for all the people who buy them, the company is stuck in idea-quicksand, like Microsoft in the early 2000s, or Apple in the 90s.
If you hit alt-tab to switch apps, then press the up or down arrow while switching apps, you go into window-selection mode.
You can then use the tab key to switch apps and the arrow keys to switch windows within apps.
It's a bit clunky, but it's there.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
It's impossible to place one window on top of a fullscreen application, so among other things you can't take notes while watching a fullscreen video. Full screen applications create their own workspaces which are children of the original workspace, and switching back to other workspaces isn't allowed. Actually, you can switch, but it will immediately scroll back to the full screen application.
Holding the Option key when clicking the green fullscreen button in a window's "traffic light" maximizes the window--makes it as big as possible within the current workspace and system UI elements--without invoking the dedicated-workspace mode. You can then place other windows on top of it to your heart's content. The choice of default behavior is up for debate, but dedicated-workspace-fullscreen is definitely not the only choice offered.
(Fullscreen mode should not prevent you from switching to other workspaces, either. I suspect a misbehaving app is the problem there.)
He set up an internal university.
Um, hey, not to burst your bubble,
but there's this free application called VLC for the mac that'll play all kinds of video formats, and if you hit command-F it goes full screen, and stays full screen if you tab over to, like TextEdit, and edit a note. The note window just appears over the video like you'd expect.
I hope you haven't been doing without this for too long!!
Was design really that good under Jobs? The aesthetics were mostly just ripped off from Braun and Samsung, and there were as many gaffes as clever bits of design.
What Jobs was good at was building an aspirational brand.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Apple should stick to their tradition of using technology in meaningful ways when it is ready.
What Apple should do is spend some of their gigantic pile of cash on R&D into anything and everything they've ever considered spending money on. Call it Apple Labs or something, to differentiate it from a polished Apple product. Maybe they'll find the Next Big Thing. At minimum they'll do some good by hiring some people, and maybe find some great employees in the process who they can bring back into the mothership with the various development ventures inevitably fold.
So, 10 BEELION annually isn't a big enough R&D Budget???
http://www.businessinsider.com...
For Microsoft: Other than mainstreaming the tablet nearly a decade before Apple? Or pioneering immersive video conferencing in the mid 2000s with RoundTable? Or laser mice? Or real-time multi-language translation? Or tool suites? Sharepoint?
For Google: Other than revolutionizing how search is done? Google Glass? Autocomplete? Google Translate? Self driving cars? Google Earth? WIFI balloons?
Now what about Apple? Other than rounded corners, of course...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Like the article states: make a device that works the way I work.
I often use my phone outdoors. Make a screen that can be viewed in sunlight.
I sometimes use my phone in the rain. Make a device that is splash resistant.
My hands have not grown since 2005 but phones keep getting larger. Make a device that fits in my hand.
Even if it fits in my hand, I may occasionally drop it. Make a device that doesn't shatter when dropped.
When I travel or go hiking, I spend less time near outlets. Make a device with a swappable battery or one that lasts days.
When I travel, I use my phone for navigation and communication. Make a phone that works on any network.
I don't want to replace an $800 device every other year. Make a device that is affordable and lasts several years.
That's a good device. Many of these problems are ones that the device manufacturers introduced because they value form over function.
iPods: see Apple paying Creative millions and millions for stealing the idea and even violating patents. Music store? Napster and others were selling well before iTunes. DRM-free music? Hello Napster! Everything you've talked about from Apple was literally created elsewhere, and refined nicely by others but weren't "shiny" so we get Apple! And as far as font scaling - you mean like iOS - FOR YEARS - required a fixed resolution for all iOS devices (and even made their bigger screens an even integer of the base resolution) because they couldn't scale? At least TrueType is supported across the Microsoft world... Apple's trying to push (yet again) a proprietary format to try to lock in its ever-shrinking marketshare...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!