Linked List: September 26, 2013

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Vesper 1.007 

I’m really pleased with how our redesign for iOS 7 turned out. There’s so much good stuff in iOS 7 (TextKit alone is worth its weight in gold iPhones) that we didn’t hesitate to go 7-only. Be sure to try the small caps option.

Time Stamps in iOS 7 Messages 

Khoi Vinh:

In fact, I think that Apple made the right call originally: only show time stamps where they add meaningful value; anything more is superfluous. I still regard these time stamps as superfluous; but this new availability is the best of both worlds: the time stamps are there, but they add no visual clutter until the user actively calls for them.

Using an iOS Device to Set Up Your Apple TV 

Very cool new feature for the third-generation Apple TV. Not sure there was any worse experience in all of Apple’s current product lineup than pecking out your Wi-Fi network password using the Apple TV remote control.

Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi: The Complete Businessweek Interview 

Complete transcript of Sam Grobart’s interview; I found this much more interesting than the cover story that resulted from it. This bit from Federighi, on what it’s like working for Tim Cook, caught my eye:

Oftentimes, a product’s design requires manufacturing to solve unreasonable problems. That’s the same as engineering a user interface design. Both are about just solving these crazy problems. But you never get a sense from Tim or from Jeff [Jeff Williams, Apple’s current operations chief] that there’s a question about why are we solving this. Why aren’t we taking an easy way out and sidestepping this problem? It is, “No, this is the right design, and we’re going to do things that no one else in the world has ever tried to do in order to get it right.”

They’ve also published the full transcript of Grobart’s interview with Tim Cook, and that’s pretty interesting as well:

I think if I bought [an Android tablet] and used it, and I thought that was a tablet experience, I’m not sure I would ever buy another tablet. The responsiveness isn’t there. The basic touch is really off. The app experience is a stretched-out smartphone kind of experience. It’s not an optimized experience. However, that said, I have always said that the tablet market was going to surpass the PC market. I was saying that well before it was viewed to be sane to say that. It’s clear that we’re 24 months away from that.

iOS 7 and Motion Sickness 

Rene Ritchie:

For many people the iOS 7 parallax effect is cool, dynamic wallpapers amazing, the Messages bubbles fun, the folder and app zooming transportive, and so on and so on. For those for whom they trigger motion sickness, they’re off-putting, nauseating, or simply impossible to use.

Parallax can be turned off in Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. So can Dynamic wallpapers in Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness. Message bubble bouncing, folder and app zooming, not so much. Apple also provides UI Dynamics as an application programming interface (API) so developers can more easily add some of those effects to their own apps. Those often can’t be turned off either. That some of the effects can be turned off means Apple probably foresaw at least part of the issue. That all can’t means they probably didn’t foresee enough of it.

Interesting side-effect of the new z-axis spatial interaction in iOS 7.

Unleashing Genetic Algorithms on the iOS 7 Icon Shape 

Fun post from Mike Swanson, wherein he attempts to generate the iOS 7 icon shape as precisely as possible.