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Fertile Ground

marco.org

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Re: Fertile Ground

#151

Post by cheald »

shinratdr wrote: post #148
cheald wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I think he's right about it being an opportunity. If you can throw away some percentage of your potential market and leave them to your competitors, you might be able to work that to your advantage. This isn't really a novel concept; every major change in every major ecosystem undergoes a similar period. I mostly take umbrage at the specific attitude taken towards this, when the same move in simi…

> I mostly take umbrage at the specific attitude taken towards this, when the same move in similar ecosystems (the ICS/JB upgrade, for example, which saw a huge market open up for "Holo-themed" apps) was mocked and derided as pulling the rug out from under users' feet. I would love to see such an example. As a follower of many Apple themed blogs, I saw nothing but good thoughts directed towards the release of ICS, wh…

Perhaps I just read too much HN. ;) I'll see if I can dig up a few examples.

Edit: After 15 minutes of googling, I'm unable to find an example to back up my assertion; I withdraw it. I'm still pretty sure it's out there, but I won't ask you to take my word for it. :)

Re: Fertile Ground

#152

Post by kybernetyk »

jmduke wrote: post #58
forrestthewoods wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the four year old non-retina iphone 3gs? I think it's safe to take that device behind the barn to retire forever. Few tears will be shed.

I don't like the idea that four years is a prohibitively long time for a device that I spend hundreds of dollars on.

It's not like your device will stop working the day iOS 7 is released. Your phone won't have any features taken away and you can keep it using until the hardware fails. (I'm still using my Nokia N900).

Re: Fertile Ground

#153

Post by alayne »

cheald wrote: post #142
alayne wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not what he's saying at all. He's saying there is disruption and an opportunity now, not that continued disruption (fragmentation) is a good thing!

For what it's worth, I think he's right about it being an opportunity. If you can throw away some percentage of your potential market and leave them to your competitors, you might be able to work that to your advantage. This isn't really a novel concept; every major change in every major ecosystem undergoes a similar period. I mostly take umbrage at the specific attitude taken towards this, when the same move in simi…

I'm a big fan of the general visual appearance and behaviors of ICS and Jellybean! After Froyo and Gingerbread, it was a relief. With all the Project Butter work, Android has become much better. I wish they would block carriers from messing up the UI.

iOS is a lot different than Android. I don't think people realize how conservative Apple is. In the olden days, Apple was very late to the table with basic OS features like memory protection. I don't really see iOS7 as fragmentation as much as a Gingerbread->Ice Cream Sandwich transition where Apple realizes they were off track and needs to correct.

Re: Fertile Ground

#154

Post by ojbyrne »

Or, in the six months before the new shiny iOS appears, every single dominant or near-dominant application on the app store decides that it makes more sense for them to build a version that targets the other ecosystem.

Re: Fertile Ground

#155

Post by tlrobinson »

chasing wrote: post #22
btipling wrote: post #10

It seems hypocritical to laud fragmentation when it happens in iOS and decry it in Android. These changes seem similar to the Android differences in gingerbread and post-honeycomb. The resulting effect on developers will be the same. iOS 7 has made it apparent which bloggers are unable or unwilling to be fair in their criticism when it comes to Apple. The mismatched gradients on the new icons are beautiful to them, t…

It's not fragmentation. Within a year, the vast majority of iOS users will be on iOS 7. It's evolution.

I suppose it's not a coincidence Apple showed off how many users are running the latest version of iOS vs the latest version of Android.

Re: Fertile Ground

#156

Post by [deleted] »

LowKarmaAccount wrote: post #108
tolmasky wrote: post #34

Yay change for change's sake. This is exactly the wrong attitude in my opinion. How does it help users to all of a sudden have most apps feel ancient? Is it really something to be proud of? That for the next year we'll be working on replacing existing utilities so that they feel "right" and "fresh" instead of doing what we should be doing: thinking of actual new software that is worthwhile to write. I've been saying…

> I've been saying this for a while but I think what is happening, and what many developers haven't noticed yet, is that we have exhausted the utility of software for software's sake... > Software was interesting on its own a decade ago, but the industry has grown up, its time to do things now. Smartphones are important because they allow people to use computers in a manner that wasn't feasible in the past because of…

[deleted]

Re: Fertile Ground

#157

Post by untog »

ghshephard wrote: post #93
untog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS7 will be a complete re-think of how applications work and behave on the iPhone. Of course it won't. That just reads like hyperbole. Apps on iOS7 will work almost entirely the same as they do on iOS6 and below.

Listen to half a dozen developers at WWDC right now - see if, based on what they have seen so far with the DP, if they aren't completely rethinking their approach towards how their apps need to work/behave to feel "modern?" I'm not up in the city right now, but from the few podcasts I've listened to - people are already commenting on how "dated" their app feels. And - with the exception of the Mail/Calendar (Apple Fa…

(and as an extra thought) you do not need to go far to imagine what apps with these new functionalities will be like - Android had them for a long time and Android apps are basically very similar to iOS ones.

Re: Fertile Ground

#158

Post by newhouseb »

jbail wrote: post #2

"iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards..." Beyond the parallax effect, what are these new navigation and structural changes? I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely curious. I'm about to build a new iOS app and I did not see major navigation or structural changes that would drastically affect how I design an app's UI or UX.

Yeah, I think this is somewhat of an overstatement. UINavigationController? Still there. UITabBar? Still there. UIHamburgerController? Not there. Another radically different way to organize UIViewControllers? Nope.

That being said, there are a few new things that do stand out:

1) Everything is supposed to be fullscreen as often as possible, with the chrome hiding as much as possible. "Deference to content."

2) Transitioning between view controllers should ideally "zoom" in to new content. Like the calendar app zooming into a day view from a month view or a year's worth of photos zooming into a collection of chronological "collections." In other words, your transitions should communicate _how_ the view controllers relate more than just you're replacing one with another.

3) Text Everywhere. (only new on iOS)

4) More abstract but also more physical (read: mimicking the laws of nature, like physics, rather than mimicking things humans have made, read: skeuomorphism)

Re: Fertile Ground

#159

Post by greendestiny »

bennyg wrote: post #121
jbail wrote: post #2

"iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards..." Beyond the parallax effect, what are these new navigation and structural changes? I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely curious. I'm about to build a new iOS app and I did not see major navigation or structural changes that would drastically affect how I design an app's UI or UX.

SpriteKit is going to be huge. Expect about a year of getting developers ready with it, and good at it, then Apple TV may have something awesome for us.

Interesting suggestion - I was surprised to see such a direct competitor to cocos2d, and despite the development budget of Apple I'm a little skeptical of their commitment to building a game engine. Maybe it'll form the basis of a better set of game engines. I'm definitely skeptical of their physics engine over Box2D.

Re: Fertile Ground

#160

Post by foobarbazqux »

unalone wrote: post #145
foobarbazqux wrote: post #32

> Fertile Ground I'm getting pretty tired of blog post titles that give no real hint at all as to the topic. My mind labels them as "pretentious" because they're pretending to be deep when they're not; by that I mean that rarely do the posts offer up any kind of non-trivial insight. (Compare with PG's similarly titled essays.) Earlier today we had "Two i's" from DHH's crew (where you had to infer from reading the pos…

Marco's not attempting to communicate clearly in the sense of "push data down foobarbazqux's infohole." He's trying to communicate clearly in the sense of "grab foobar's attention, state his perspective provocatively, and attempt to not only reach an audience but make them think and talk." Clearly he's succeeded, from the conversation going on in this post. Marco is occasionally pretty obnoxious, and his ideas are fr…

To be honest, I only clicked on Fertile Ground out of a yearning for self-punishment. I knew exactly what kind of article to expect from a title like that, it's just that I like to complain when it happens that I get what I want and I also don't like what I want. The sense of superiority makes me feel a bit better, kind of like those cranky old guys that think most everyone else is an idiot. The main difference with PG seems to be that I have to read 5000 words before arriving at that all-too-familiar sinking feeling. Well, I hope I've contributed to the overall cynicism levels around here, and I wish you an absolutely rotten day.
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