The iPad Mini

Simple idea: Once the initial bugs are ironed out of the iPad’s “iPhone OS 4.0″ software, copy the new OS version onto the iPod Touch (which is currently on v3.x), and use this as an excuse to rebrand the 4.0-powered iTouch as the “iPad Mini“.

iPhone OS3 is still a prototype

The iPhone isn’t yet a finished product.

That sounds an odd thing to say, but if you hang out in an Apple shop and watch when a newbie customer asks about the iPhone or iPod Touch, there’s usually a moment in the pre-rehearsed demo where the shop assistant says, “watch this!” and turns the device on its side. The screen display’s supposed to rotate into landscape or portrait mode, and even work when it’s held upside down. Most decent apps will support three or four orientations. But when the Apple people demo it, they sometimes make the mistake of demoing the feature when the device is showing the homepage. And then they get confused when it doesn’t rotate as expected, and start shaking or tapping it.

Because although Apple expect third-party apps to support different orientations, their own desktop doesn’t. Nobody seems to know why. The Ippy version of a desktop would be one of the easiest “rotatable” apps to write – all you have to deal with is a set of simple icons and text, snapped to a rectangular grid – but they haven’t done it yet. Maybe they keep forgetting.

Same with the iTunes app. Fixed orientation. On 3.1.2 It doesn’t even support reversed portrait mode (button at the top), which doesn’t need any layout changes.

They haven’t yet gotten their own apps conforming to the platform’s design conventions, even on v3.1.2. The Safari web-brower works fine no matter which way you hold the Ippy, so someone on the Apple team has been doing the work that they’re being paid for, but it’s difficult to understand how the other things were missed.

Next, the help system. Every user-friendly device has onboard help, accessed in a single standardised way, right? I mean even Windows 3.1 had a fairly decent help system. The Ippy’s help system … doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have one. Some of the better app designers include a help icon, but they have to design and place it themselves. Maybe Apple think that the device is so simple that it doesn’t need a help system?

Ditto the application version number, originating company and legal notices. There’s no standard “about” box for an Ippy app. If Apple didn’t want features like “Help” and “About” cluttering up their GUI and wasting precious screen space, they could have had a gesture to call up these sorts of extended application details, but they don’t.

Desktop machines tend to have an “info strip” somewhere, with status icons and the like. This is also the logical place to click for drop-down menus or accessing extended functions, or system functions. The iPhone/iPod Touch has a thin infostrip along the top, with a few icons and indicators for things like battery life and signal strength, but you can’t launch anything from it. Tap on the signal strength icon and it doesn’t launch a network signal-strength monitoring utility, as you’d expect (partly because the Ippy doesn’t come with one). Most of the infostrip is blank, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to add the conventional “info” and “question-mark” icons there but … noooo. Touch-wise, that strip’s just wasted space.

This brings us to gestures. We’re told about how great the wonderful gesture system is, so where’s the official list of standard gestures for use with iPhone and Ipod Touch apps?

Again, it doesn’t seem to exist. If you don’t have a global gesture system, or at least a list of gestures reserved for global system use, then how are you going to get the Ippy to work properly when you have a number of apps running at the same time? Ah. Apple’s answer is … to block users from running multiple apps simultaneously. Seriously, even the old Atari ST had a better thought-out system than this, and that was back in the 1980′s, when multitasking was in its infancy. This is pure pook.

What you do currently have on the iPhone and iPod Touch is a front-panel button (the “home” button). This takes you back to the desktop. Fair enough. But if the button fails, what’s the alternative method of getting back to the desktop? Doesn’t seem to be one. A swipe “go home” or “close app” gesture would be handy, but, as we found out, the Ippies don’t really go in for standardised gestures. You gotta keep prodding away at that button.

Cut and Paste … it was pretty unforgivable that the iPhone OS  2.x didn’t have a way to copy text between applications, but it’s difficult to get too upset about it now that it’s been implemented on v3.x. The current system (press and hold for edit, wait for the magnifying glass, release to see markout and cut/copy/paste options) is okay, but really press-and-hold ought to be a standard iPhone convention for editing or viewing secondary properties for anything on the device. It ought to be equivalent to  “Control-Click” (what non-Apple users would think of as “right-click”). That might have provided another way of allowing people to see “Help” or “About” screens without cluttering the interface. But press-and-hold isn’t implemented consistently.

What Apple still haven’t yet fixed (re: text-editing) is cursor control, a way to to nudge the edit caret up or down or left or right, or select sections using non-widget commands. This should be trivial to implement:  you could, say, press-and-hold to enter extended mode, and then tap above, below, left or right of the held finger to nudge the cursor, as if you were tapping the “arrow” cursor keys on a keyboard, perhaps swipe with the second finger to mark out a block. The current workaround … doesn’t exist.

These sorts of omissions don’t just make the user-interface less consistent and less intuitive (you have to learn what works and what doesn’t, and adjust your working methods around the problems), they also hold back further development, because there’s not a solid user-interafce foundation to build on. It makes iPhone OS look like a platform that Apple aren’t developing properly because they don’t expect it to be around that long.

Cut/Copy/Paste probably took so long to implement on the iPhone OS because it came with new graphical widgets that needed to be developed and beta-tested and refined. If the gesture library had supported proper cursor control and Cut/Copy/Paste gestures from the outset, the feature could probably have been implemented  earlier in the development cycle. If they’d still wanted to write a graphical version, they’d have been free to take their time about it without people getting so upset.

The frustrating thing about these missing functions is that they’re not hard to implement in a way that’s consistent with the iPhone OS look-and-feel. This is entry-level, 1980′s “GUI principles for beginners” stuff. Most of these things should be fixable (individually) by a good engineer in an afternoon … if you also have to table meetings and policy documents and followup meetings,that might stretch out into a fortnightto cover everything on the list, but really, how long should these things take?

If I was a project manager for iPhone OS, I wouldn’t have let the iPhone/iPod touch out of the factory until details like this were resolved. I would have felt personally embarrassed to release a product with petty issues that weren’t patched, not because of any physical, mechanical or technical problems, but because someone at Apple simply couldn’t be arsed to do proper project management of the product’s development . These things distinguish a working prototype or beta release from full production software, and 3.1.2 isn’t yet there.

Anyone want to bet on whether they’re fixed on version four?

The Apple PowerMac G4

The Apple G4 Power Mac (1999-2004) was a gorgeous piece of design.

I don’t mean the innards … it was pretty underpowered at the time compared to some “performance” PC’s, and I know about the noise problems and audio shielding problems that appeared in some of the later G4 models … as a product range, it had problems, especially if you tried to use the later models for audio work.

But the case … the case was lovely.

Seen from the side, it was a soft-shaped bulging organic square, whose two squarish sides stretched outwards at the corners to fuse together as four transparent plastic arcs that functioned as carry-handles.

The two lower handles acted as supports, the two back ones acted as cable protectors (so that you didn’t accidentally shove the machine too far back and make the connectors hit the your rear wall, damaging the connectors and cables), and the upper two guaranteed that there was a convective outlet for the exhaust. Cold air could circulate in under the machine, rise up at the back, and exit out again at the front, all in the space created by the handles.

It was the kind of blobby radially-symmetrical shape that computer graphics people sometimes design just for the heck of it, to have a sculptural shape that simply looks cool. But in this instance, it was actually a functional computer.

The case was so nice, that a few years later, some people bought up old G4 cases and put faster, more recent PC motherboards in them. I’d personally quite like a hollowed-out G4, purely as a decorative piece of furniture and storage box.

Design classic.

The Apple One Button Mouse

If there’s one thing that’s always made non-Apple owners take the mickey out of Mac enthusiasts, it’s the one-button mouse.

To many non-Mac users, the one-button mouse is the ultimate symbol of style over functionality. It’s the anorexic supermodel teetering down the catwalk in ballet boots and a blindfold, coked out of her brain wearing a plastic binbag with a peacock feather up her arse and a lampshade on her head.

It’s arty pretentiousness taken past the point where it starts to get in the way of doing real work.

Defences

I’ve seen Apple enthusiasts attempt to defend the one-button decision by saying that you don’t really need a second button, all you have to do is hold down a control key when you click to produce the same effect.
Which is fair enough … except that instead of moving and flexing one finger, you now need to use both hands, one on the QUERTY keyboard, and one on the mouse. And the idea that the single-button mouse is disability-friendly (because you can use it wearing boxing gloves, without accidentally pressing the wrong clicky-bit) disappears when you start asking people to operate two pieces of equipment at the same time.
This isn’t a Keith Emerson lookalike competition, and great design isn’t meant to deliberately make gear more difficult to operate.

Nobody other than Apple seemed to use one-button mouse. The Atari had two. The Amiga had two. Maybe some old “pointer” image-digitisers with magnifying lenses had a single button, because moving your finger might jiggle the pointer, but that was about it. For Atari and Amiga’s budget machines to have only one button would have made them fractionally cheaper to produce, but the reason they didn’t do it was because they knew it’d have been a false economy. It was simply a crap idea.

The more sensible Mac enthusiasts won’t argue the point, because it’s not defensible.
They’ll agree, yes perhaps the O-B-M is a little bit dumb, but point out that the styling of the included mouse doesn’t really matter, because if you’re a genuine media content professional (and not just a poseur), you won’t be using the included mouse anyway … you’ll be spending some cash on a more expensive mouse, and that’ll have two or more buttons that the Mac’ll recognise. Or better still, on a graphics tablet. You’ll be putting the included mouse in a drawer and forgetting about it.

But if you’re buying a laptop … I dunno, if I was spending serious money on a laptop and it only had one button, then I’d feel a bit conned, and every time I looked at the trackpad, it’d really bug me. Forever.

Farewell, one-button mouse

Having taken a stand on the one-button issue, Apple were trapped. The “big” thing would have been to swallow their pride and make a joke of it, and move on. That’s what we tell little kids to do when they break something. Be a grown-up, ‘fess up, put it behind you, and use the experience as a motivational tool to help you to avoid doing anything that silly again. Don’t make things worse by going into denial.

But Apple didn’t want to admit having made a lousy ergonomic decision and perhaps losing face, so they fronted it out until the technology allowed them to produce the equivalent of a two-button mouse, without it actually having two identifiable buttons.

This took decades, but we’re finally there. The new MacBook has no buttons above the trackpad, you tap on the trackpad to click (which people tend to do anyway), but you can assign a trackpad corner to be the right mouse button. Or you can trigger a right-click with a two-finger tap.

Their new Apple MagicMouse has no buttons either, it responds to gestures. But one of the setup options implements the brilliant idea of assigning “click” and “control-click” to taps on different sides of the upper surface. Just like, um, a two-button mouse. Magic!

So hey, Apple got there in the end. It just took them a couple of decades to get there.