151–160 of 330 posts
At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to screens. I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.
I just wish MacBooks had something like HPs half height expanding Ethernet jacks.
I worked with Jony after we were acquired. The original Siri linen background was his idea, the bubbles had to be perfect, the padding, the text size, the lists goes on. I inferred this as design obsession and did not find it offending, he was right 95% of the time.
When I left Apple, I emailed with Jony on a device I had designed and pitched internally in 2011 but was shelved. His response has stayed with me to this day, “not all ideas make the cut, even the best ones”.
He could have cut me down or ignored me, but he responded with honesty.
I think that void he left when he moved on was too big to be filled. Steve and Jony were always together, pretty much every day we would see them at lunch.
In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated. Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs. But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring. In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams. Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that…
Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style.
For crying out loud, everything they make is black.
There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I buy a dongle and maybe it’ll support 1080p, maybe 1440p, maybe 4K? Who knows! The Amazon review certainly won’t tell you, the company selling it to you will lie through their teeth. You won’t find out until you’re plugging it in (probably during a presentation) It’s just so much fun playing dongle roulette.
This made me laugh too much. It's true on so many levels with anything I bought recently on Amazon.
But dongles would still suck so probably the answer is “technically yes, but not in a meaningful way”.
I respect Ive's design skills but I think that Ive leaving is one of the best things to happen to Apple in decades. They're slowly going from Ive's minimalist artistic designs back to useful computing devices and user interfaces.
I wonder how exactly Steve managed Ive, getting his best out of him without ... going full Ive ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because every TV in every space in your office has a mini display port cable hanging out of it for you to plug into?
We use WiFi to stream the signal, which is far more convenient. But yeah, all the monitors have display port as well if you want to plug in.
Having said that, most of our spaces now have a box that lets you share via Teams meeting, which generally works fine too.
No cables is the holy grail!
All our monitors on desks have a USB-C cable so that’s nice and easy to get connected with these days.
I really loved the design of the Touch Bar/Butterfly keyboard visually. It would have been great if: - They kept the butterfly but completely solved the failure problem. - Supported Touch Bar with actual haptic feedback that could really be used "professionally" as in a Pro device. It could at best become a gimmick, but if played right, had great potential. - Had a simplified thin chassis with less ports. I really do…
> loved the design of the [product] visually [but it was a functional failure] Is Ive's trademark.
From the outside, it seems like the poison of flat design only flourished when Jobs died. The beautiful, thoughtful, intuitive, accessible skeuomorphism was replaced with flat design only after Jobs wasn’t there. Was Jony only able to wrench away the beauty then? It seems like it. Humans live in a 3D world and take visual cues from things like lighting, gradients, shadows, materials and textures. Flat design strips t…
If they had a geriatric mode that concentrated on functional UI over form, I would probably use it myself. Here are the most obvious issues (some are Safari specific):
* Lack of scroll indicators. If you don’t know you have to scroll, then you are screwed. It doesn’t have to be scrollbars, but there must be some visible indication and/or control so that the need for scrolling up or down in particular is obvious and discoverable.
* iPad multiple windows. The usability of this is completely broken. I would also love to disable it for myself, because I don’t use multi-tasking and the UI only ever frustrates me. Horrific UX.
* Keyboard focus indication. Watching your mum type into a field, scroll, and not realise the keyboard focus is not where she expects is hella frustrating. Should a field outside the viewport even retain keyboard focus?
* completely broken. I have watched my mother type in a number using a comma (because other numbers on the page were displayed with commas) and the UI silently fails. Same with $. I’ve experienced this as a developer - it is just sooooo broken because the field accepts invalid characters but input.value == "" which is fucked.
* auto-hiding the tab bar in Safari. Mum opens a hundred tabs. And doesn’t know about the rest of the Safari toolbar. Just leave the chrome visible please.
* Hard to Undo. I remember how fucking magical undo was, and still is. Undo is not accessible (although admittedly far far worse on Android). Implicit save is fantastic for most things, but frightening for some settings. System confirmation modals as a workaround are seriously fucking nasty.
* The top-right swipe system menu is difficult to learn. Especially for system modal changes (rotation lock, wifi, bluetooth).
There are so many complicated things on the iPad that I need to teach my mother, just like Windows of yore. Some of those issues can easily be fixed, if the UI were to be more obvious and less “pretty”.
Maybe they could call it “beginners” mode. Like the opposite of a “pro” model or something.
While I am being a whinging Englishman, they could fix some bugs too. 4 major iPadOS versions, and I still run into the same fucking bugs every day. I mean, the hardware is great, but why do the same bugs persist forever? Obvious bugs, with many appearing to be very shallow. Maybe hire some devs to fix bugs as their only job?
At work, the new MacBooks with HDMI are trickling in and I've never seen so much excitement around a laptop. People (mostly Product people) just giddy they don't need a dongle to connect to screens. I didn't realize how much people hate dongles.
I mean, I buy a dongle and maybe it’ll support 1080p, maybe 1440p, maybe 4K? Who knows! The Amazon review certainly won’t tell you, the company selling it to you will lie through their teeth. You won’t find out until you’re plugging it in (probably during a presentation) It’s just so much fun playing dongle roulette.
In my opinion, the work Ive did at Apple is greatly over rated. Yes it is clean and minimalist, and some devices like the iPhone 4 were truly innovative, bold and impressive designs. But overall, this is mostly bland, generic, boring. In the same minimalist style, I prefer the work of Dieter Rams. Some Sony products have really good design, including devices that were released a few years before the iPhone, but that…
Citing IBM as good at design makes this read like a parody. Everything IBM does is so hilariously ugly in the least imaginative, boring, industrial way that they’ve gone through “boxy” into some other universe where it’s almost — but not quite — good style. For crying out loud, everything they make is black . There are famous Apple ads deriding the bland corporate look of IBM!