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Apple’s Magnum Opus

brooksreview.net

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Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#41

Post by dmix »

bonzoesc wrote: post #38
banjomonster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My girlfriend does exactly the same thing. I wonder if its a gender thing? Her PC kept freezing, but she loves her new Mac Air.

I don't close programs anymore either, and I'm male. I do close documents to keep Exposé from getting unworkable, but my emacs usually has dozens of buffers open.

To provide a anecdotal counter point to balance this discussion, I obsessively close windows I'm not using.

I dislike clutter and distraction. If I leave a Twitter client open or IRC I easily get distracted by it, so I'm constantly hitting CMD-W and use Quicksilver to open them when I need distraction. Same with iTunes when no music is playing.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#42

Post by rimantas »

bane wrote: post #23
blantonl wrote: post #18

Quote: "Apple’s keynote message was loud and clear: iOS 5, Lion, and iCloud are not feature bumps — they are revolutions in how consumers are to think and use computing devices." My emphasis above highlights an amazing observation. Per this, Apple has now crossed over the line of "what people want" to "what people need."

I think Apple crossed this long ago with the iPod. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

And similar sentiments were repeated with iPhone and even more with iPad. Apple does not do focus groups research for a reason.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#43

Post by bad_user » 

    I don’t know of a single other way to take a document
    I am working on with my iPad and jump to my Mac having 
    the document up-to-date
I do, it's called Google Docs.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#44

Post by [deleted] »

banjomonster wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #15

Re: the "this is how it should have always worked" comment. I've watched my girlfriend use her computer, and this is essentially how she works. She just leaves everything open, never saving anything. She's comfortable using Expose to manage the million windows she ends up having open, but doesn't bother exiting apps when she's done with them and then starting them when she needs them again. If she could do this and h…

My girlfriend does exactly the same thing. I wonder if its a gender thing? Her PC kept freezing, but she loves her new Mac Air.

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#45

Post by tjogin »

podperson wrote: post #2

I think this article pretty much nails a key part of it. What Apple wants to do is implement a seamless digital world that Just Works. (It remains to be seen whether it does in fact Just Work.) Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC (and, once again, be redirected to Douglas Englebart et al) ... the kind of thing Apple is demonstrating with iCloud, iOS5, and Lion is essenti…

I guess the way I feel about ideas is that you don't own an idea just for having described it once, thus if someone else implements it they didn't steal it either.

In my opinion, you don't even own an idea that you've implemented poorly. Thus if someone else thinks they can implement it well, they didn't steal the idea.

You own an idea when you've implemented it well, maybe even really really well. Before that it's just a proof of concept.

And even then you still don't own the idea, you've just got bragging rights to it.

A good example would be the tablet. In the minds of most people, Apple owns that concept, everybody else are imitating it; that's what Apple gets for making the first really good implementation of it, even though Microsoft and a bunch of other companies made several really poor implementations of it years before.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#46

Post by robenkleene »

joebadmo wrote: post #17
matthew-wegner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't one lead to the other? What's the technical difference between allowing person to touch the same document on 4 devices, and two people touching the same document on 6 devices?

I don't know what the technical differences are, but I'm not sure how that's relevant. My point is, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in enabling that. And I'm not necessarily talking about collaboration, but even just sharing. Apple has given me great ways to take, edit, store, and organize my photos, but my primary purpose for all of that is to show my photos to others. They seem to have ignored that part. If you…

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't the system-wide Twitter integration addressing exactly the point you are talking about? I'm not saying this means they shouldn't be doing more, but I don't think saying they aren't doing anything on this front is correct either. iPhoto on the mac also got Facebook integration recently (though I find it to be buggy).

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#47

Post by tjogin »

mishmash wrote: post #40
ajross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of what I'm thinking. This only looks revolutionary if you haven't been watching Android at all. When the G1 shipped with universal integration with gmail, calendar, contacts, google checkout, etc... it was a revelation. When the "share via..." interface was extended (often via third parties) to handle youtube and twitter and facebook etc... it was really great... And now this is a focus for Apple too. Gr…

>Handsets have been moving in this direction for 3+ years now. And iTools is 11 years old. Don't believe the popular iTools/dotMac/MobileMe is crap argument either, iDisk was badass when it debuted. And despite all the press regarding MobileMe's launch, the syncing actually works really well too. You can image a machine, plug in your AppleID, and within a few minutes - all of your stuff (including individual app pref…

Exactly. For Steve Jobs it's closer to two decades, even.

As described in Steve Jobs' closing keynote of WWDC 1997, where he outlines his setup from eight years earlier (1989).

http://youtu.be/3LEXae1j6EY?t=14m25s

This idea didn't come to Apple via Google, it predates Google's existence, by a decade.

The technical solution was different then, but Steve's focus is on the user experience, and that is quite similar.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#48

Post by mclin »

bad_user wrote: post #43

I don’t know of a single other way to take a document I am working on with my iPad and jump to my Mac having the document up-to-date I do, it's called Google Docs.

If I add a calendar event to google calendar I'm still a bit surprised when I later notice it in my iPhone calendar.

Same with updating contacts across devices.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#49

Post by bad_user »

mclin wrote: post #48
bad_user wrote: post #43

I don’t know of a single other way to take a document I am working on with my iPad and jump to my Mac having the document up-to-date I do, it's called Google Docs.

If I add a calendar event to google calendar I'm still a bit surprised when I later notice it in my iPhone calendar. Same with updating contacts across devices.

To speak the truth - the Android integration with Google's contacts could be better.

To transform all my locally stored contacts and make them Google contacts I had to first export them to a file, copy them on my laptop, upload to Google, mix&match duplicates and other corrections, download an export again on my computer, delete all my contacts from my phone (which also deleted my contacts from Google), reupload that export to Google, then synchronize my phone with Google's Contacts.

Now everything I do on my phone or in Google's Contacts is kept in sync nicely. I also have Facebook sync set so I get faces of people for free and sometimes email addresses or phone numbers that I didn't have :-)

But it was a painful experience to export my old sim-stored contacts and sometimes I get the feeling that while Google has the right idea about what people want, they are moving too slowly to fix their shit.

Re: Apple’s Magnum Opus

#50

Post by rmc »

banjomonster wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #15

Re: the "this is how it should have always worked" comment. I've watched my girlfriend use her computer, and this is essentially how she works. She just leaves everything open, never saving anything. She's comfortable using Expose to manage the million windows she ends up having open, but doesn't bother exiting apps when she's done with them and then starting them when she needs them again. If she could do this and h…

My girlfriend does exactly the same thing. I wonder if its a gender thing? Her PC kept freezing, but she loves her new Mac Air.

I strong suspect it's a non-techy thing. The only reason it might seem to some here to be a gender thing is because the majority of people here are straight men, and ones girlfield/wife/partner is the person you'll see doing mudane things like typing on a PC.
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