Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. #
Since getting my new 27” iMonstrosity yesterday, I’ve been gawking at icons at 512×512 and bathed in their lavish detail and I just wanted to share a few of my favorites with you. You may already know them; but have you ever taken a closer look at them? Notice the subtle detail on the stem of the leaf of Coda, the minute detail of the paper in Thing’s icon and the way the abstract iconography of the leaves meet the realism of the yellow center of the Versions flower.
I love the engineers behind iPhone OS. They’re head, neck, shoulders and torso ahead of everyone else. It’s kind of scary in a way, as it probably shows just goes to show how far behind everything else is in contrast.
Not to pick on WordPress, I’ve just spent a good deal of time with it over the last few days, and it struck me again yesterday how, as I was testing a slew of role management plugins (argh, by the way), that I would activate a plugin, and subsequently not have the faintest clue where to look for any new UI inserted by it. Some put a single options page under Users, others inserted whole bundles of pages, some put them where I least expected it…
Contrasted with the iPhone, where when you install or update an app, from the phone itself, it will actually exit the app store and take you to the screen where the icon is, and show you that it’s being installed/updated. This usually takes 10 – 20 seconds, and you’re good to go; it’s right there ready for you.
It’s a small thing, and in the cases where you’d prefer to stay in the store it may be mildly annoying, but on a larger scale it means a lot less frustration and searching, even in a system as simple as the iPhone.
I could pull out a plethora of reasons why the media manager in WordPress needs to be the focus of the next major release after WordPress 3.0, but honestly, this particular issue seems to say everything there is to say on the subject.
Seriously now; did anyone even bother testing it? How long has it been like that?
I love WordPress; I actually really do, but you can’t just throw the first media manager that crosses your path into WordPress core and think that’s that… And I’m not just talking about this either. I’ve looked at the code; I’ve reverse-engineered the code. It’s not pretty, but more importantly, it’s symptomatic of a whole heap of problems in WordPress in general.
A Snow Leopard-esque release would do wonders; though I have to wonder if it won’t break the back of those who take it upon themselves to try it?
I think I’ve fallen in love with CloudApp. At first I didn’t really get it: “What does this do that DropBox doesn’t already cover?”. But now that I’ve had it running for a few days, it dawned on me that I’ve used it every day since then, several times a day in fact.
What is it? Well, essentially you install a small menubar icon on OS X (no Windows client yet), which ferries any files dropped upon it into the cloud and puts a hyperlink to that file into your clipboard.
Yeah, sure, the same functionality exists with DropBox, but it has more steps, and let’s face it, that’s what separates the boys from the men, or rather, the software you use, and the software you use without thinking about it.
If you work a lot with other people online, or if you just like to share(/spam Twitter like me), you can set it up to automatically upload screenshots; which once you start remembering that functionality, suddenly starts coming in handy.
Add to that a wonderfully clear aesthetic throughout, which helps to construct an image of utter simplicity.
Because I so enjoy the showmanship that Apple seems to have a market monopoly on these days, I’m always disappointed when upcoming products are ‘spoiled’ ahead of time. It’s part of the image that Apple has built for themselves; their secrecy isn’t merely a matter of protecting their ideas before they can act on them, it’s just as much a marketing tool and a narrative device.
But where spoiling the surprise is annoying and the spoiler acting like a retard about it, is regrettable. Wrecking a mans life on your propensity for more pageviews? That’s somewhere in the outer regions between ignorant, selfish, disingenuous and plain ol’, straight-up, head-on, praise-Satan, Temple-of-Doom-Kali-Ma, Evil.
The fact that that particular ‘article’, if you want to call it that, had all the hallmarks of wanting to walk in the shoes of the kinds of ‘in the moment’ pieces that more established and honorable publications carry with grace, only made it so much worse. What sickening tripe.
I hope Apple steps up and buries Gizmodo in more legal trouble than they ever dreamed of.
‘Journalistic integrity’, spell it bitch! I said spell it!
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