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Scott Forstall leaves Apple

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Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#121
post #109
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man what luck for Apple that Braun didn't take out a design patent on this.

It wouldn’t matter. Design Patents are valid for fourteen years. Every single product Dieter Rams designed for Braun is decades older than that. Don’t fight patents with cheap lies. There are plenty of reasons why patents are bad, bad, bad, no need to resort to untruths.

What cheap lies? I'm well aware of how old that design is.

If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original designs. Why take a 30 year old tape recorder and mimic that, is that really the mark of originality that Apple stands for? It seems quite hypocritical to me.

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#123
post #121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t matter. Design Patents are valid for fourteen years. Every single product Dieter Rams designed for Braun is decades older than that. Don’t fight patents with cheap lies. There are plenty of reasons why patents are bad, bad, bad, no need to resort to untruths.

What cheap lies? I'm well aware of how old that design is. If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original desi…

It’s most certainly not hypocritical to believe that there should be time limited monopolies on designs and copying designs for which that monopoly has run out. Simple as that.

Don’t argue over ridiculous stuff like that. There is no need for these cheap polemics.

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#124

Interesting that Eddie Cue remains the company fixer, taking on the quirky Siri and the flakey Maps app just as he was once given a completely fucked up MobileMe. This is good news. Even better news is Browett's ouster. The business with his cutting operational corners in retail was a very, very bad omen. If they'd left him in, he might have poisoned a very important well for the company. Hopefully his replacement is…

Eddy Cue is also the one responsible for getting Apple to make a 7"-8" tablet:

http://allthingsd.com/20120803/apples-eddy-cue-saw-market-fo...

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#125

Does anyone but me here listen incessantly to podcasts? The latest Podcasts App from iTunes is a skeuomorphic mess. It has a superfluous animation of a reel-to-reel player of course. But it utterly fails at its most basic task: playing a goddamn podcast. But don't take my word for it, it has a 1.5 star rating on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/podcasts/id525463029 Not to mention crashes... Apple used to make…

You likely know this already, but Downcast is an awesome podcast app, it has location based downloading as well, which is great if you're a commuter.

(I also listen to a lot of podcasts and have been disappointed by the Apple Podcast app).

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, do you have a source for the stock cash-out?

Sure. Here you go: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57425920-37/apple-exec-sco...

Thanks! Interesting quote:

    Although a major sell-off can sometimes mean an executive 
    is leaving a company, that might not be the case with Forstall.
I wonder why this didn't generate any rumours of his departure at the time?

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#127
post #107
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that Dixon's eventually scaled back its high-street presence completely and is now found only in airports. If his role at Dixon's was what got him a job at Apple, I'd be really surprised!

Dixons is just one brand of Dixons Retail (formerly DSG International) which also owns Currys, PC World, etc. They rebranded all their high street stores to Currys.digital, and although store numbers have been declining, they are still a regular fixture on high streets.

That would explain why Currys and PC World are also ridiculously awful.

Every time I go into one of those shops, it's because I need something immediately, to take away. They never have it in stock, and ask if I'd like to order it. If I wanted to order it, I'd do it myself, online.

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#128
post #121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t matter. Design Patents are valid for fourteen years. Every single product Dieter Rams designed for Braun is decades older than that. Don’t fight patents with cheap lies. There are plenty of reasons why patents are bad, bad, bad, no need to resort to untruths.

What cheap lies? I'm well aware of how old that design is. If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original desi…

Reasons:

1. That Braun thing was produced decades ago, and probably they haven't sold a single one of them in the last decade or so.

2. A podcasts app on an iPad, is in no way competing to an ancient cassette player.

3. They're in different categories. It's like if I "copy" a Mercedes logo for a window. Though I'm not particularly in favor of Apple/Samsung case ruling, it's clearly different to copy an element for a competing product (a tablet) or another product that's a whole different beast and is no longer for sale.

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metro is defined by flat background colors, square corners and no shading. You can have a non-skeumorphic interface without any of those features, and given Apple's history of interface design, it would surprise me if they adopted any of them. Apple loves rounded rectangles, gradient backgrounds and shading to indicate depth, though shine and real-like textures may be on the way out.

Shading and round corners are skeuomorphic, as is indicating depth on a piece of glass. What Apple loves is irrelevant (if one is willing to ascribe emotional states to corporations). Daimler-Benz loved steering tillers. Ford loved hand throttles. Think about the way in which the interfaces of automobiles changed over the first forty years as they went from horseless carriages to widespread adoption. That's what we'r…

Rounded corners aren't necessarily skeumorphic; they're a style choice just as rounded cabinets and trim are a (popular) style choice. Likewise, shading and gradients to give an impression of depth and lighting are often used to distinguish items that are clickable or as a separator. These are artistic tools that can be used to various effects, but are not skeumorphic in the sense of trying to imitate a familiar object from everyday life. Virtual representations of objects can be 3D without being skeumorphic; the illusion of depth can be used to convey information.

Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple

#130
post #110
post #33

Just to be clear, he's not "leaving." He got fired. He got fired because after the map fiasco became apparent, he refused to send out an apology or sign his name to the one Tim Cook sent. (internal knowledge)

(No internal knowledge) I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt. They had some kind of problem with Google Maps, and wanted to build their own capability, which was never going to be easy. He might have been fired if he cheated, by creating a well curated Valley dataset to prove to the other execs what a gr…

> I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt.

The problem is that they released that first attempt. iPhone and iPad weren't their first attempts at phones and tablet computers, they were simply the first ones good enough to take to market.

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