“Apple today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.” The most important thing to remember is that Ive will head interface design. Ive is supposedly not a big fan of skeuomorphism, so hopefully, iOS and OS X will move away from the My First Operating System-look. Expect the current popularity of skeumorphism – including elaborate reasoning as to why it’s the best choice – to magically radically decline among Apple fans.
I’m almost embarrassed to use iCal.
Hope it brings about the death of that ghastly linen texture backdrop for the notifications pull-down too.
I’m not a fan of how far Apple’s taking skeumorphism, but if you’re going to throw out a “My First Operating System” comment, throw it in the right place. The Win8 start screen’s “designed by Crayola” style along with the incredibly dumbed down Metro apps feel like a far more appropriate place for a comment like that.
Try crayolas to draw the outline of a rectangular shape and then fill in the colour.
See? It’s quite hard to copy Windows’ live tiles with crayolas.
Yea those Apple fanboys are ridiculous, always buying their iMacs and posting the latest Apple news on their websites. Wait a sec….
Jony Ive will manage to turn the trend around and make Apple’s UI classy and usable again
Jonathon Ive aka “one trick pony” will introduce a GUI using rectangular tiles with rounded corners.
It’s a good thing then, that Apple invented the rounded corner and has a patent on that.
Did Microsoft patent the rectangular tiles yet ?
To be fair to him… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_iMac_USB_mouse.jpg
;P
I have yet to find, even among the hardest apple fans, someone who is talking good about ical leather or the OMG-WTF “find my friends” leather app which is even worse if you can believe that.
This, and the ios6 maps failure, are the reason for the demise of the Steve Buscemi of technology.
I tend to mentally filter out all those decorations so I’m generally not bothered.
The only thing that does keep surprising me is the Find my Friends app. I’m not annoyed about how it looks, but it does seem strange.
Scott went from crown prince to “advisor”, that’s going from leading scorer for your team to assistant coach. It’s a demotion and my guess is he’ll eventually find another challenge somewhere else.
I don’t think it’s the maps thing, more people at Apple would have known the quality was dodgy. Tim could have overruled Scott and stuck a beta label on it.
He probably lost a power struggle with a couple of other VPs, one being Jony.
Congratulations, good guess: “Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year”.
Erm, I totally misread the text. Next time I’ll wake up before I type something.
according to more recent reports.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3574022/apple-scott-forstall-ios…
The amount of effort being expended in the effort to make people like the new absolutely completely schizophrenic Windows 8 interface is just astounding. To even suggest that that UI, with its hidden controls, split-personality, inability to manage blank/white space, etc, is just amazing. Yes, I am not a fan of the faux-leather look of iCal, etc, but at least I don’t have to worry about not knowing which actual interface I will have to use when launching an application, one that is pre-configured for me or one I can manage myself, making the windows of multiple applications the size “I” want them to be, arranged how I like, and not just a pre-determined grid of squares and rectangles. I’ve used the Windows 8 consumer preview and absolutely hate it, lest anyone think I’m just a Mac fanboy.
I am personally NOT embarassed to use Calendar and Notes or Reminders on either OS X or iOS/iPad. I do agree that it can lead to extremes in which functionality in the app is negatively affected by limitations which would only make sense in a physical product and not a digital one.
All UI’s use icons, design bits and pieces, that try to evoke familiar concepts and skeuomorphism is just one way to do this.
I agree that focusing on it excessively can make a UI less and less coherent, but I disagree that you cannot build an uniform UI because of it… you would have to ban all customizations of buttons, standard UI elements, you would have to force developers certain color palettes, etc… if you would want to impose the notion that the only PURE way to offer a consistent UX is to have exact graphical uniformity across apps.
Too many words to say basically this: IMHO you can offer a consistent UX even with multiple apps using skeuomorphic design because of the functionality each app embeds, how it presents it (which is more than its appearance in terms of shape and color) and how it reacts when the user interacts with it, and the general usage flow of the app itself.
I believe Objective-C, Cocoa and iOS X are actually Apple’s biggest assets. They give them the edge and make it possible to build all those other wonderful things in an efficient way.
Wasn’t Forestall the chief architect of that?
Skeuomorphisms are not even a secondary issue. They will not make or break Apple.
Refusing to admit an issue and take responsibility is not a good thing for a leader.
Jobs rarely if ever admitted to Apple having problems with any of its hardware or software.
Forstall spent the last 15 years under Jobs. I imagine he thought that if Jobs wouldn’t have given an apology, why was he expected to do so? That hasn’t been the Apple way of doing business.
I think there is a going to be greater internal strife between those of the Job’s way of doing things and those of the Cook way of doing things fighting for supremacy. What the final outcome of that ‘war’ will look like and how it effects Apple’s bottom-line remains to be seen.
I personally respect that Cook admitted to the obvious problems with the maps app.
Closer to 2 decades probably, considering he came over with Jobs from Next.
WRT Jobs and apologies, the closest thing I could recall is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=player_detailpag… or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=player_detailpag… …but those were basically about Apple before his return (though OTOH, characteristic of his first time and Apple, and some mistakes with Next)
If that were really the case, shouldn’t more people care about GNUstep?…
And then, it didn’t prevent the recent broken maps – delivered by Forestall, and he apparently publicly refused to repent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Forstall#Departure_from_Apple
Actually I do think more people should care about GnuStep. Etoil~A(c)OS looks very promising.
All the effort that went into Gnome and KDE got the open source community nowhere. If it had been spent on GnuStep we would have a nice Mac OS clone by now. And Apple could not even do anything about it.
Stay of execution I think.
The last time I was this pissed with Apple was 1997… thanks to the powermac 7300, which was just the same as the powermac 7200, except it was CRAP.
Why, after several centuries of hammering away at turning ligntning and fire into extraordinarily powerful tools, capable of unlocking the mysteries of the universe, simulating lifeforms at the molecular level, and connecting every point on the planet to every other point on the planet within less than the blink of an eye, the brightest minds in the world, in order to revolutionise the way we manage our lives, in ways we couldn’t imagine, by replacing our cumbersome diaries, notepads and address books, toiled away in back rooms, partitioned off from each other and the world to create something so incredible it required trademarking every superlative in existence.
What have they given us?… a PICTURE, of a diary, a notebook and an address book.
I spent a fair bit of time earlier this year going back to have a look at the time Steve Jobs spent putting together NeXT. The vision was extraordinary, the pool of talent was brilliant, and they didn’t have any of these cookie cutter morons trying hype the latest incredible version of photobooth. Look at the cube, at the boards, the software, the marketing material, the documentation, the magnesium enclosure, the drop-dead gorgeous logo. Those things were just begging to solve hard problems… and, no rounded rects either.
And not just NeXT… this isn’t a fanboy thing. Hartmund Esslinger designed the Next Cube, as well as the first Sparc machines for Sun, and the early Snow White machines for Apple… IIc, SE/30, IIcx and the Quadra 700 are particularly sexy. The original sparc hardware with all the hard edges looked like it should have rendered the universe 1.6 times faster than realtime… the kind of stuff vampires would buy.
Then there’s other gems like the SGI Crimson. SGI didn’t fail because they couldn’t make an affordable products and stay relevant. Their biggest mistake was changing the logo.
Some think this stuff’s not important, but it is. When you walk past your machines, do you think of them as something annoying, cumbersome, full of hollow promises, or do you feel guilty you’re not using it to its full potential?
But the cube was tied at first to the mistake of MO, and no FDD in the times when it was definitely premature (one can argue it was premature also with iMac, since it created a whole new popular category/waste of USB FDDs).
And you know, it seems that Forstall was with Jobs since the Next days… (though maybe not the earliest years, not the 80s)
A bit “smoother” forms of Classic and LC475 resonate the most with me, I see them as the nicest …might be because they were pretty much the only ~old Macs I had contact with, hm (at school, in a place where Apple hardly existed otherwise)
What do vampires need such computers for?
And oh come on, SGI was clearly swamped by the rise of consumer GPUs and Linux.
I’d say the ultimate goal is to make the machines… invisible. Ordinary tower PCs go somewhat in that direction, they are typically hidden under the desk. Laptops are also like that, really – they are essentially formed from two halves, display and input; the computer part isn’t very prominent.
I love the part of your post with “several centuries of hammering away” BTW
Edited 2012-11-03 05:55 UTC