Linked List: June 18, 2013

Tuesday, 18 June 2013

Neven Mrgan on the iOS 7 Icon Template Grid ★

Neven Mrgan:

But whether we accept the idea of a grid or not, here’s the bigger point: no icon designer I’ve asked thinks Ive’s grid is helpful. In that sense, it’s wrong. The large circle is too big. Many apps in iOS 7 use it: all the Store apps, Safari, Messages, Photos… In all these icons, the big shape in the center is simply too big. Every icon designer I’ve asked would instead draw something like the icon on the right. To our eyes — and we get paid to have good ones, we’re told — this is more correct.

Michael Heilemann on iOS 7 ★

Some of the best criticism of iOS 7’s design that I’ve seen.

Matt Gemmell on iOS 7 ★

Matt Gemmell:

Press coverage is disproportionally focusing on the Home screen (about which more in a moment), but the reality of day to day usage is that you’ll spend time in apps. Where there were previously gloomy cubbyholes and low ceilings, there are now floor-to-ceiling windows, skylights, and clean surfaces.

I think it’s an enormous improvement, and a typically opinionated move.

Second Least-Surprising Tidbit From the Apple-DOJ E-Book Price-Fixing Trial ★

Peter Kafka:

The “page curls” in the iBook app, which show up when you flip an iBook’s page? That’s Steve Jobs’s idea.

You can see that he liked the page curl from his demeanor during the demo, starting around the 3:15 mark.

New 13-Inch MacBook Air Runs for 15 Hours in PCMag Battery Test ★

Joel Santo Domingo, reviewing the new 13-inch Air:

Road warriors and jet travellers rejoice, we’ve found a laptop that will last all day and well into the night. The newest Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid-2013) lasted an astonishing 15-and-a-half hours on a battery test that makes most current mainstream ultrabooks and ultraportables cough and die after four to six hours. The fact that the system gives up very little if any day-to-day performance is astounding.

Not bad.

Persuading David Simon ★

Maciej Ceglowski:

The security state operates as a ratchet. Once you click in a new level of surveillance or intrusiveness, it becomes the new baseline. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes permissible in exceptional cases today, and routine tomorrow. The people who run the American security apparatus are in the overwhelming majority diligent people with a deep concern for civil liberties. But their job is to find creative ways to collect information. And they work within an institution that, because of its secrecy, is fundamentally inimical to democracy and to a free society.

Remarkably thoughtful essay; if you read only one thing this week, make it this.

Designers on iOS 7 ★

Week-old roundup of day one designer commentary on iOS 7. I was right about one thing: it’s polarizing. Two remarks I very much agree with:

Craig Mod:

What was outlined today looks like a very rational base on which to extend the OS — somewhat timeless, far more timeless than what we had before.

Justin Rhoades:

I think the design had to be reset so that newer interaction models could surface. More gestures, more animations. They added a physics engine to the SDK. It’s like a pendulum swinging from obvious visual affordances to engaging kinetic ones. The parallax effect, the physics of the messages bubbles and I’m sure many other ‘kinetic’ behaviors are new to devs in iOS7. Apple wants apps to use more motion and less visual design.

Fargo 0.80 ★

Dave Winer:

A few minutes ago we flipped the switch on smallpict.com and now all the sites there are being managed by a new content management system Kyle and I have been working on for most of this year.

What this means is this: you can publish from Fargo to a blogging system that understands outlines at its core.

Dave Winer, outlining, blog publishing systems — that’s a story as old as the web itself, but the technology here is all new. (Includes Markdown support, too.)

Update: Brent Simmons on Fargo and Dave Winer:

I’ll put it another way. I can take a good idea and make a nice app, but Dave can make a good idea.

iTunes Radio ★

Tyler Hayes on iTunes Radio:

The design and goal is clearly focused on listeners purchasing music — but even so, iTunes Radio feels like the first truly modern take on what terrestrial radio wishes it could be. Radio was always meant to be a promotion tool, a way to sell more music, but without being built directly on top of the world’s biggest music retailer, it was always too distant from the marketplace to be more effectual. Now a “buy” button lives next to every song, or a wish list one for those hesitant, and it feels like this is how modern radio should function.

Agreed; iTunes Radio is well-done and well-designed. I’m a little surprised Apple is making everyone wait for iOS 7 to get it.

Huawei ‘Considering’ Nokia Acquisition ★

ZDNet:

According to the Financial Times of London (paywall), Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, said at the launch of its latest smartphone offering, the Ascend P6, in London: “We are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination has some synergies but depends on the willingness of Nokia.”

“We are open minded,” Yu told reporters.

Update: Huawei issues statement saying it “has no plans to acquire Nokia”.

‘Of Course, They’re Trying to Kill Me.’ ★

Speaking of interviews with Simmonses, Dave Hamilton at The Mac Observer talked to my Q Branch colleague Brent Simmons last week during WWDC regarding the development of Vesper.

Nexus 7, One Year In ★

Dustin Earley:

I can’t find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn’t seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps.

I tried the basics at first, like a factory reset. I then moved onto drastic measures, like rooting and installing CyanogenMod 10.1 (which I thought would surely fix everything, since I’ve used faster devices with lesser hardware, and performance problems were merely a lack of software optimization). And nothing seems to work.

My first-generation iPad from 2010 works just as well as the day I bought it. Actually, even better, because iOS has gotten better.

Update: A lot of pushback from readers on my claim above, arguing that their first-gen iPads have been rendered slow and unstable by iOS 5 (the last OS to support the hardware). My son uses mine for iBooks, watching movies, and playing games. Mileage clearly varies with other apps. (And yes, the App Store app in particular is a bit crashy.)

Chatology 1.0 ★

New from Flexibits (makers of Fantastical): Chatology, a $20 Mac utility for searching your iChat/iMessage archives.

Update: Brief interview with Flexibits’s Michael Simmons from Lex Friedman at Macworld.

Least Surprising Tidbit From Apple-DOJ E-Book Trial ★

Brian X. Chen, reporting for the NYT from the e-book price-fixing trial:

Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs.

In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point.

Get Rid of the App Store’s ‘Top’ Lists ★

Marco Arment:

The race to the bottom. Deceptive low-now, high-later pricing. Scam and clone apps. Shallow apps with little craftsmanship that succeed, but many high-quality apps unable to command a sustainable price. The “top” list encourages all of these — we’d still have them without the list, but to a substantially lesser degree.