John Gruber illustrates the dangers of not having a clue about history: “The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious ‘system’ ever designed.” Thanks for playing.
John Gruber illustrates the dangers of not having a clue about history: “The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious ‘system’ ever designed.” Thanks for playing.
This is a picture of the Newton OS (which predates the Palm OS):
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/extra/newton/controlpanel….
I’m pretty sure can find something that predates that and maybe something else that predates that etc.
I believe once again you’re missing the point and the point is Apple’s philosophy to make iOS simple and usable; the limit of what should be there and what shouldn’t.
Piling on endless features that just adding complexity and going to extremes (larger and larger displays) is the easiest thing you can do.
Regardless, you’ve credited Palm countless time with the “invention”(?) of the mobile platform. Let’s assume you’re correct. Don’t you find it sad then, that Palm who were the first ones to come up with this great idea, never really produced a great product with it?
Palm devices were a joke.
When the iPhone came out Colligan (Palm CEO) said “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in”. Well, they did.
And the WebOS, we know what happened there.
Edited 2013-02-20 09:34 UTC
That’s a picture of the control panel of the Newton. This is what the Newton’s home screen looked like:
http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/appletell/_NEWTON_thum…
The Newton used a notebook metaphor, like PenPoint OS. A paradigm that nobody wanted.
Also, I never credited Palm with the invention of the mobile platform – don’t put extremist words in my mouth just to make you look smart. I credit Palm with creating the mobile platform upon whose concepts and ideas all other platforms after it were built. Newton and PenPoint were dead ends – a metaphor nobody wanted and nobody bought. Palm’s mobile platform was the first successful mobile platform, and showed the industry what people wanted out of a mobile device – everybody else has followed and built upon that platform ever since.
A sneak peak into my upcoming massive Palm article:
Edited 2013-02-20 09:40 UTC
I think it was kind of obvious that it was the control panel, it was in the url. You were disputing historical facts and credibility about design. You could very easily argue that the Legencary Palm OS Home Screen (TM) was influenced by the Newton.
However, you’re still missing the point. Apple’s iOS and home screen has had been a phenomenal success and has had great influence on the current mobile market. Both the iPhone and the iPad were laughed on when released.
Look were we are today.
Were Apple designers/engineers influenced by Palm in the process? I’m pretty damn sure they were.
Edited 2013-02-20 09:51 UTC
Where you out travelling the world for 2007? You forget that they were in the absolute minority. People laugh at anything that is new, as there are always these cynical sceptics.
Also iPhone did not take off before AppStore became available. And the current dominant platform follows an approach that is not like iOS(when it comes to homescreen organization).
Edited 2013-02-20 11:43 UTC
He’s not missing the point. He’s answering the point you raised. You provided the picture of the Newton in an attempt to challenge the claim that Palm invented the simplistic icon home screen.
You can’t change the subject, just because you were mistaken.
Incidentally, who was laughing at Apple at the launch of the iPhone? The only entity I can think of was Microsoft, and they were bound to do that, because the iPhone was a competitor to their own WinMobile 6 phones.
It’s not a Newton, it’s a MessagePad. Newton is the name of the operating system, MessagePad is the name of the device that runs the Newton operating system.
Another device running the Newton OS is the eMate 300. It does have a home screen with a grid of icons. I have one right here.
The MessagePads also had icon grids to launch apps, but it defaulted to a notepad application when you turned it on. I have one right here.
I don’t think it really matters what you see when you turn it on, Newton based devices and Palm devices all used icon grids to launch apps.
My Psion 3a uses a row of icons. If an app has user files they are listed under the app icon and can be opened directly from there.
It’s not strange Apple went for this grid solution as it’s easy to do, easy to use and the Macintosh in a way also had icon grids. Sure, you could move the icons and break the grid, but the basic idea was a screen with little icons that launch apps.
Hold on… as someone who actually owned a Newton Messagepad 120 and used it quite a lot, you are wrong. The NewtonOS had an app drawer where all of your installed apps lived. That is what looks identical to the earliest PalmOS devices. It was a tray with a grid of icons. Yes, the NewtonOS opened in the notepad app (because it was a “notepad”, DOH!), but if you wanted to use any other apps installed (and the Newton had a pretty vibrant 3rd party app community at one point), you opened the app drawer and launched them from there. So, yes, the Newton “launcher” looks exactly like the PalmOS home screen. There you go. This doesn’t even take in to account that later versions of the NewtonOS didn’t even launch the notepad by default and instead showed you the launcher straight away (e.g. eMate 300.)
EDIT: Some could also argue that the way the Newton filtered the apps in to categories was wholesale stolen by Palm for PalmOS 3.0, because PalmOS 2.0 (and prior) sure as hell didn’t do that, they instead scrolled (rather awkwardly) the launcher up/down to get to the app you wanted. I also owned (and still do) a Palm Pilot Pro, so I could probably even get pictures, if proof was required. I used to install third party launched on my PP just to be able to manage the mess that the launcher was in.
Edited 2013-02-20 12:59 UTC
The central point of interaction on the Newton was the notebook. That was its central metaphor. I have a 120 right here, and what you’re referring to is the ‘extras’ folder – which contained a bunch of utilities like a calculator, and settings panels. It’s a small aspect of the notebook metaphor – not a central one like it is on iOS or Palm OS. That’s because NewtonOS is built around the notebook – not around applications. It’s not application-centric.
It’s a fundamentally different paradigm.
Yes, the eMate opened the drawer by default. This was after the success of the original Pilot.
Edited 2013-02-20 13:03 UTC
And all other third party apps. The NewtonOS also categorised those apps (you could go in and choose which category they lived under), which PamlOS didn’t do till PalmOS 3.0.
Well, maybe the cynic in me sees the Palm Pilot and thinks “clever Palm, they took the Extra’s folder idea from the Newton and ran with it – good on them.” Because that is an absolutely valid angle to take. Just because you want to support your premise by dismissing a completely valid prior implementation (and no one here is claiming Apple invented that design, just that they used it before Palm) I think you’re being very short sighted. For any user (e.g. me) who owned a Newton and *didn’t* want to use the Notepad, the extras folder/app drawer was KEY to using the device, no matter what you claim to the contrary.
Edited 2013-02-20 13:07 UTC
Palm proved that this was valid for just about EVERY user. Nobody bought a Newton. It was a flop, for a variety of reasons: it was slow as shit, and the UI and its paradigm were complicated and cumbersome. Hawkins and Palm figured out what users really wanted (like you, they wanted an application-centric design), and we’ve been using that ever since because it was the right way to go.
On a sidenote, it’s absolutely fascinating how just about every design and implementation consideration for Palm OS was focussed on speed. Lots fo cool stuff about that in the article.
Edited 2013-02-20 13:12 UTC
I don’t disagree with any of that at all. I do think the NewtonOS was poorly executed on the original MessagePads (OMP, 110, 120 and 130.) It got a lot better and faster on the later models (the 1000 and what have you), though the eMate 300 went back to being underpowered *sigh* (though it was using the same CPU as most of the RISCOS machines, so it was more to do with power consumption and slowing down the clock rate of the CPU to not suck the batteries dry in 5 minutes, rather than actual horse power.)
The extras launcher should absolutely have been the primary view, but it wasn’t. But then – it did exist, and people did use it all of the time. Unless you really believe no one ever used anything except the Notepad
Whether the Newton was popular or not, they are still sought after now and go for stupidly high prices. I sold mine after owning it for about 4 years for the exact same price I paid for it (used – something like ^Alb15.) I doubt I could sell a PalmOS 2.0 era device for more than ^Alb2 these days.
Yeah, I loved my Palm Pilot. It was a pleasure to use. I cut my teeth doing mobile dev using it. But it wasn’t all rosy, and the Newton’s “hidden” extras/app drawer was still miles ahead of the launcher in Palm OS 2.0.
Edited 2013-02-20 13:33 UTC
Speaking as a former Newton developer, I’d disagree with your characterisation that Newton OS as not being application-centric and built around the notebook.
Newton OS was most definitely built around apps. Notepad was just the default app – later versions of the OS would let you swap that default to any other app. If you set Dates (for example) as the default app then Notepad would turn up in the Extras drawer and you could launch it from there.
The three main apps (Notepad, Dates, and Names) were all separate apps. The OS supported a ‘windowed’ view system, so Names would sit above other apps – and smaller ‘utility’ apps were not forced to run full-screen.
The OS was a highly dynamic object-oriented environment which would let third parties build extensions for the inbuilt apps. For example you could have extensions that would add new “stationary” types to the Notepad, or new card types to the Names app. All data was stored in “soups” – a dynamic OO database system. There was an OS-wide extensible “routing system” which was how you’d send emails, print, or fax – routing extensions were automatically made available in all apps.
In many ways it was a significantly more advanced OS than anything we have today. I often wonder what it would have developed into had it not been canned.
you are ignoring psion
there definitely was a huge market for multitasking devices
I liked Palm devices. They were great to play Hearts on when traveling by train.
Over time they became better and worse. The OS became better, as did the hardware, but the feeling increased it could and perhaps should have been better. This feeling was fed by competing products, like the Windows CE and Symbian powered devices.
And since when is iOS home screen is simple? It’s much more complex as a whole, than any other platform.
Icons that change(and some don’t – calendar vs weather) and the notification bubbles are not simple.
Errrr… yes they are with more than a days usage, I guarantee you’ll understand them.
Kind of defeats the claim of simplicity.
Not really. I guarantee *you*, most others get it right away
I agree with you completely. I’ve never heard anyone refer to the iOS homescreen as anything other than simple & easy to understand. I know someone with a 3 year old who navigates the screens to find her Zoodles game, the camera, and the photo library no problem. Additionally I know a few elderly people who are just about the opposite of tech-savvy that seem to manage just fine as well. I would expect otherwise if the UI was anything but simple.
This is intentional. Apple designs simultaneously for the Luddites and the tech savvy, because those two extremes are their target audience. My boss at the sheriff’s office is a technological neophyte (despite, ironically enough, being in charge of a data processing department) yet within a day of owning an iPad mini she had the majority of its functionality down.
When I briefly had an iPad (now owned by my fianc~A(c)e) I was using it to ssh into my home server, create real music with GarageBand, and write parts of my novel with a $5 app that rivaled the excellent Scrivener for Mac.
My point being, it was just as easy for my clueless boss to pick up and use as it was for me, a ravenous consumer of all things tech. That’s the beauty of Apple’s design philosophy and also the source of a lot of the ridicule they suffer: Nearly anyone can pick up an Apple product and figure it out within minutes.
??
It’s called My Writing Spot. It doesn’t have all of the advanced features of Scrivener, but it is by far the best mobile writing app I’ve used. Anything I wrote with it, I would sync into Scrivener when I got home in one step.
…then why bother?
They are within the framework of Apple fanboy logic, where “popularise” == “invent”. Devices running the Newton OSes don’t count because they were spectacular failures as commercial products, and the fact that Newton devices were unpopular automatically means that they were crap. And obviously Palm wouldn’t have taken inspiration from a pathetic failure like Newton, so all of PalmOS’ features must have been created completely-independently & any similarity with Newton is clearly just a coincidence.
I could spell out the joke there, but I think it will be much more entertaining to watch iFanbois take that statement and argue against it.
Not nearly as sad as the fact iOS is still playing catch up… to the old PalmOS, half a decade after it was discontinued. Sad in a pathetic kind of way, that is.
Seriously? Never heard the expression about stones and glass houses, I take it… which reminds me, have you and the rest of the Apple Defense Brigade figured out how to rationalize-away Apple’s flip-flop over 7″ tablets? Or are you just using the strategy of “if we never bring it up, then maybe people will just forget”?
Yes, it was superior to iOS in every way (except to the “durrrr, there’s an app for that, durrrr” chimps) & only lost out because it was developed by a company that was already circling the drain, then sold to a company managed by special education drop-outs.
But hey, I hear webOS is Open Sores now. Maybe Apple could warm over the remains and then take credit for it, just like they did with the corpse of NeXT. They could call it “iOS Pro”…
No, no, no. “invent” == “innovate” in your usage. Please look up the difference if you are unaware. If you listen to any Apple keynote or read Apple Propaganda/copy, they never claim to “invent” anything there is a definite prior art for. I’d go as far as saying they never use the word “invent”, but I can’t be 100% sure about that, so I won’t make up facts.
If that was true, a lot of later Palm devices (i.e. most of the late Garnet and almost all of the WebOS) are also in that category. As are most of the early Microsoft Windows CE devices and the later 6.5 ones, and all of the Windows Phone 7 and even all the Meego based phones (and the other Maemo devices.) In fact, there are plenty of devices that exist today in a cult like status, even though they were extremely unpopular at the time of manufacture (Vectrex, NeoGeo MVS both spring to mind, and the PCEngine/TurboGrafx in Europe – as it was never released here.)
I dunno. The Newton reached cult status, and when I was on the “scene”, there was still a lot of development going on (maybe 4 or 5 years ago) and the later Newtons were going for stupid money ($200+ for a 10 year old PDA is pretty ridiculous.)
I’m not sure they are.
Humans are fallible. I guess “Android first”, “GoogleTV everwhere” and “Windows Phone dominating”, or really anything else out of Balmer’s mouth in interviews, proves all of that.
Sorry, no it wasn’t. The API was cute, but it was hard to write any real apps for until they released a native SDK, because with all the will in the world, native without native you can’t leverage all of the third party libraries available and make performance king.
*sigh* Flame bait aside, WebOS is a slow OS that requires quite fast hardware and a lot of optimisation to run well. The fact that the Palm guys proved this by porting the WebOS tablet stack to iOS and making it run “better” was pretty telling. Basically, you completely missed the *real* reason Palm failed with WebOS, and the reason they would have failed again – even if another company had bought them. Their initial hardware was slow and underpowered. There you go.
The sad thing is that you don’t even seem to understand what happened with Nextstep and Openstep. It’s still alive and well. It runs on ARM and PC, as well as PowerPC. It’s now called Mac OS X and iOS. It’s the same underlying OS, same underlying API’s and well, had Apple not bought Next Inc, it would be a largely forgotten now.
I think Nextstep is largely forgotten – only us ~geeks know it morphed into OSX.
Had Apple not bought Next Inc, ~geeks would still remember it (by the virtue of www being bootstrapped on a Nextcube)
The springboard is one of the things that annoys me the most about iOS. It takes simplicity too far, having each app be its own icon and all apps forced to appear there. I’ve got a lot of apps installed and the most irritating thing about the home screen is having to remember: ok, now what page is that app on? This is one area that I think Android (even with stock launcher) did much better. The home screen is where your most commonly used apps go (old style Windows desktop, anyone?) and you can pull down an apps list to get the rest. Much simpler.
And yes, I know about spotlight search, but having to type in part of the name of an app I’m looking for isn’t exactly the most productive way to go on a device with a 4-inch screen.
What? You can place mostly used app on home screen. What’s so different or difficult here? get a clue before post please.
Edited 2013-02-20 10:27 UTC
Wow, learn to write and actually debate without personal insults before posting, please. Now, let me explain something. It’s not the most frequently used apps that are a pain to find, it’s those that I use less frequently but still do use. I do not remember what page I put every app (or folder) on, thank you. Now, I use an iPhone as my only phone as well as an iPad, and I’d bet I know just a little bit more about iOS than most. Here’s where Android shines though: I know the name of the app that’s not on my home screen, so I open the apps list and find it in an alphabetical list. That is simplicity. With iOS, what do I do? I can either browse through each page of apps and folders to find it (tedious), open spotlight search (kind of bothersome on a small device) or I can reset the home screen to force all entries into alphabetical order. There’s just one problem with that approach though, I lose my most frequent apps on page one, because all the default apps get put back there when you use this option. So explain to me again, how the iOS approach is superior? This time, you may use complete sentences.
I think this is one of my biggest gripes with the iOS interface too. At my part time job I was trying to configure a coworker’s iPhone to access our server remotely, and I couldn’t find the Settings app icon to save my life. I handed it back to her to see if she could find it for me, and it even took her about thirty seconds. And she uses the device all day every day!
Swipe left, type “settings” in to the search field. Unless the user has gone in and specifically turned off indexing (it’s on by default) a few milliseconds later – you will have the settings app listed. Top tip, probably verging on power user, but well worth remembering.
That might have been her next step if we hadn’t found it (buried in a folder labeled “Useless Stuff”, by the way!), but I have never had more than a handful of apps on an iDevice so it never even occurred to me.
I use it more on my iPad, as that has 64GB of storage, and it’s much easier to install an app and misplace it. On my Phone, I tend to delete stuff I don’t use and only reinstall when needed. I also don’t put settings in a folder marked “useless stuff”..
Why not use folders like the rest of us in iOS do? Put your folders on page 2 and your most used apps on page 1.
Wasn’t iOS supposed to be “effortless”?
Do you ever tire of replying with the same clueless attitude?
Eh, he has a point. Managing app placements and folders on iOS is arguably more work than the android solution, especially if you have a lot of installed apps..
Stock Android (as in, what is on a Nexus device, such as a Nexus 7), is just as much work. Except, you potentially have 2 icons to deal with – the one in the app tray (which can’t be physically moved, but you must delete to uninstall the app from the launcher) and the one that gets thrown on to the home screen when you install an app from the Play store (that you can manage a lot like iOS.) However, the icon on the home screen is just a short cut (though nothing visually tells you that) and you can delete it without affecting the app int the app tray. I’m sorry, that’s just disjointed. Either let me put the app on the home screen, or the app tray – both is overkill. And the fact that the stock 4.2 app tray is in alphabetical order and doesn’t appear to allow any other type of sorting is more than a little annoying. It turns in to a soup, especially when there are a lot of apps installed. Scanning through the pages to find a specific app is laborious, so I fond myself resorting to the iOS approach of putting the shortcuts on the my home screen. But then I do that with Windows too – I have about 30+ icons to various apps on my desktop. I really don’t see that Android is any improvement over iOS – both have a fundamental flaw in the way they manage a pile of icons. For me, iOS wins because it’s most like PalmOS, and PalmOS was where I started with PDA’s (though I have also owned a MessagePad 120 as noted above, that was much later.)
Rewriting history and their importance in it has been a Apple hallmark since the mid ’80’s…
Apple didn’t rewrite this event, John Gruber made a remark that was interpreted by Thom as being such a thing.
Gruber doesn’t state that Apple invented this type of home screen, he calls in an innovation and not an Apple invention.
When comparing the iOS home screen to the home screen from Thom’s link you’ll notice the iOS one is simpler.
Don’t forget we’ve moved on from a rather “simple” time to a far more advanced one, yet Apple managed to not only keep their home screen simple, they apparently made it even simpler than Palm’s as proven by Thom.
With regards to Apple rewriting history: they present us with stuff they call amazing, magical, blah blah. Then you have people that compare it with previous stuff of other companies and when they find a match, sometimes a very good one, sometimes a rather fat fetched one, they claim Apple rewrites history.
They don’t claim to have invented the desktop GUI, mobile phones or tablets. They brought it main stream or put a different more successful twist on it.
It really isn’t. You clearly never had to explain to people how to move icons around, how to create and un-create folders, and so on. The iOS home screen has lots of unintuitive and hard-to-find things that ought to be simpler to perform.
What is your suggestion to make it easier to move icons around and create folders?
Besides, these are optional things. You don’t have to perform them to use iOS, ever. Yes, if you know how to do it it will probably make operating your iOS more convenient, but it’s not mandatory.
That’s the problem of it. It happens accidentally all the time. I’ve had to help COUNTLESS people whose applications had suddenly moved around, whose homescreen wouldn’t stop jiggling, whose applications were suddenly small and in a square, who didn’t know how to remove shit, and so on.
Ooohhh…. “I’m out of space on my iPhone!” Is the one that I like the best.
Maybe you should be more selective of who you become friends with. :-p
My 9 year old knows how to move apps and create folders. I didn’t tell him, but he saw me do it once. So if we both like a game it mysteriously disappears to be found in his folder later on.
Moving apps and the folder thing are operations people don’t tend to discover by themselves, but only need to be shown once to be understand. That’s not to praise iOS, it’s the same with Android and WP.
I watch Apple keynotes not only to see the new stuff, but get “training” too.
(when icons start to wiggle my assumption is that the first thing confused people would do is hit the home button, which would stop the wiggling)
My 7 year old can do it also. And as the same method works on Android, the skill is now transferable.
7 y/o are the worst examples. They are not afraid to experiment and will understand modern technology faster than you can blink.
If a 7 year old can learn, what’s stopping you?
Thinly veiled ad hom’s?
No, it was an honest question (be it one of slight disbelief!)
Try telling that to my 57yr old mum, who refuses to even swipe to the next page of her iPad. I need to put all the icons or the stuff she uses (which is basically 7 or 8 apps in total) on the first page.
Then again, my mum’s probably an obscure case. She used to think the “Internet” was an application, hence I had to rename the Firefox desktop icon to “Internet” on her old XP system in order for her to identify it.
[/tangent]
^aEURoeAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.^aEUR
^aEURo Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible
^aEURoeWe are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.^aEUR
^aEURo Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
^aEURo Douglas Adams
There’s another quote I can’t seem to find that (if I was to give the gist) something like “in our youth we accept technology, by our 30’s we struggle with it, but our 50’s it’s black magic” or something like that.
Here’s my all-time favorite:
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”
–Douglas Adams
That is a very good one indeed!
Which skill? The moving of icons and creating of folders or stealing your dad’s games and ruining your game progress? :-p
If Apple doesn’t come up with a way to share an iPad with multiple users, which I’m sure happens a lot within families, I’ll have to buy my son one.
Which is, most likely, why they haven’t implemented multi-user features in iOS.
Those clever BASTARDS!
I wish Google had allowed the master account to control the installed apps on other accounts, rather than the “you can reinstall any app almost instantly – but have to buy paid apps again.” model. It’s nice that apps you reinstall on a second account install in seconds with no download, but the fact you must repurchase apps for the same device (as far as I can see) just to use it on another account is horrible and money grabbing of them! I’ve yet to try signing up with the same Gmail account – maybe that works?!
It just may.
I bought Minecraft for my son and on my wife’s iPhone I just logged her out, logged in under my account, free downloaded Minecraft and it worked while she can still use apps downloaded under her account.
“If Apple doesn’t come up with a way to share an iPad with multiple users”
Very sorry but Apple are not aiming their devices at people too poor to buy one each, that’s what Android is for.
If someone is too poor or unable to safe money to buy an iPad I think they shouldn’t be buying any tablet.
I have a growing dislike for people that claim to be poor, yet drive around in a car while wielding a smart phone and at home they have a flat screen TV and a computer with Internet access.
Are you sure about that? Bubbles, folders and changing icons don’t exist in iOS?
It’s not Apple to rewrite history, it was one person in particular. You know, the one that “invented multitouch”.
Bubbles, unless it’s a game that features Michael Jackon’s monkey, are not in iOS as far as I know. You can’t change icons. Apps can change them though, but it’s not like they change them in to something completely different causing confusion for the user.
Folders are in iOS, but they are optional. You don’t have to acquire this skill to operate an iOS device.
I have a lot of experience using Palm and iOS devices. On the easy-to-hard scale of usability I would rate them very close to each other, but to me the iOS screen looks more simple.
If you have learned to use one I’m pretty sure you have no problem using the other. iOS does have more things you can do, most not mandatory to use the device, but they are easily learned.
You don’t know what are notification bubbles? Are you sure you own an iOS device?
Waaaayyy to contradict yourself, dude.
Looks vs operates, are two different things.
Ah, notifications. I guess you’re a Windows user and call those balloons bubbles.
Yes, I do own iOS devices and they do show me notifications, but I’ve never had the urge to call them “bubbles”, because they don’t look like bubbles.
I see no contradiction. Reading your other comments attached to this story it seems you get confused by the calendar app showing the current date while the weather app launches the weather app.
[/q]
I have a number of iOS and Palm devices. You turn them on, they show icons, you press an icon, the app starts. iOS can do more, but you don’t need to have this knowledge to use the device. Never mind all those extra’s, the real functionality is with the applications. Take those away and the device becomes pretty useless. The iOS extras are easy to learn and there aren’t that many.
IMHO the iOS screen looks more simple than the Palm one. Not that the Palm one is difficult to understand, it’s quite simple too and that’s a good thing.
Really!?!?!?!
Bubble:
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs46/f/2009/232/9/8/Blue_Bubble_by_hallv…
Balloon:
http://www.csballoon.com/img/purplemet_balloon.jpg
iOS icons with “those” – do they look like ballons or bubbles?
http://i.stack.imgur.com/EQsS5.jpg
Well… Maybe can and can’t mean the same in your head.
The operation of both contradict your claim of simplicity. Both show a number. Both numbers mean the content of the app, not part of the logo. One number does not change the other does. You get used to it(like I did), but people get used to SAP Legacy Workbench as well.
No, they aren’t “bubbles”, nor are they called “bubbles” by Apple in English. They are called “badges” by Apple and any Apple developer worth half their salt.
The concept isn’t even hard to understand – “you have X amount of items that you have yet to look at”. So for Mail, that is emails. For Calendar that is new appointments. For Messages that is sms/imessage. For other apps, it depends on what the developer is trying to convey – but generally it’s going to be “items I have synced for you in some way shape or form.”
Edited 2013-02-20 13:21 UTC
Why the f***k would I care what Apple calls them? They look like bubbles more than they look like anything else.
There is also the idiom “to bubble up”, that works better than badges in the context of notifications.
Because no one who knows anything about iOS would understand what you are talking about. You’ve already confused at least one person. To me, a bubble ia a notification popup in the notification area in Windows or a bubble hint from either Mac OS X or Windows. Your definition was opaque and makes no sense. They look more like balls to me, or circles. If you’d said “red circles on the icons” I would have understood you, but “notification balloons” sound like you mean the actual pop-up notifications that occur at the top of the screen.
Sorry, never heard of it before in that context. I can see that you are “bubbling up” with rage though, so might I suggest you’re fighting an empty battle with nothing but a hollow victory. They’re called “badges” and you willing them to be bubbles isn’t going to change that. To me, a native English speaker, the concept of a “badge” makes a hell of a lot more sense than a “bubble”.
Hey guys, how about you all laugh over the miscommunication and have a cup of coffee?
Why not a soda? It has bubbles.
I’m drinking Dr Pepper as I type… very bubbly indeed!
Most people don’t seem to know Dr. Pepper in The Netherlands, but I see it at most supermarkets and I like it. But as most people don’t know it I often have to explain what it is when I drink some.
I’ve just grabbed some mineral water with badges, ehm I mean bubbles.
The Dr Pepper we used to get (before Coca Cola started producing it in the UK) was actually imported from the Netherlands and bottled in my home town. Pretty crazy that it’s not popular there!
Yeah, those Dutch are nuts!
When I order a drink I often go for 7UP and the waitress looks confused at me. Ah, you mean Sprite!
So last time I ordered a Sprite, to prevent this confusing, but it didn’t help. Ah, you mean 7UP!
Not sure what happens if I order Dr. Pepper.
We have the same issue with Coke/Pepsi. Most pubs/restaurants sell one or the other, and the usual British request will be for a “Coke”.. So when I (rare drinker of alcohol) ask for a “pint of Coke”, if the establishment only sells Pepsi, the server will always reply “A pint of Pepsi?” It’s like a sort of “game”. I’ve never asked for Pepsi, so I don’t know what happens in that case.
The world will explode!
I’ll tell you a secret.
My wife is away today and she told us to get a pizza. Just for the fun of it I’ll also buy a bottle of Dr. Pepper.
I think the problem is that you have no iOS experience. Those “bubbled” numbers are called (notification) badges, the informational messages that appear at the top of the screen are called notifications and can also be found in the notification center. IIRC it’s the same with Android. Well, Android borrowed the badges, iOS borrowed the notifications.
Personally I don’t think these feature should cause any confusing, certainly not on the long term and users prefer to have them.
Neither the badges or the notifications change the icon grid in such a way that people are not able to launch their favorite apps.
Yes, by Apple. They also call your network operator a carrier, even if you selected British English.
Android has no badges. Unless it’s another skin. iOS borrowed the notification drawer only(and they shouldn’t have stopped there)
Yeah… right.
And I said they were confusing? They are not complex, per se. They are misplaced. If you have your to-do app on another page, you’ll have to move around between the screens to see if that app needs your attention. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of apps I use regularly that don’t fit on my first page. Swiping to check if I have to open them is not simplicity of operation.
Everything complex is made up of simple things.
You must have A LOT of apps you use regularly if you can’t fit them all on one page. On my iPhone I have only 3 screens: the home screen which I left mostly like Apple made it, one screen with all my serious apps and one with games. In total I have 197 apps, which is far more than I would gave guess to be honest. I can’t imagine you having so many regular apps that they wouldn’t fit on one screen.
All my social apps are in the bar at the bottom in a folder, mail is at the bottom too. This is where most badges appear so they are always in sight.
I’m confused. You think that’s a good thing or a bad thing?
I think it’s a good thing.
It’s good if you are almost instantly able to operate a device and as time progresses learn the more advanced features.
I guess it’s even a must these days as manuals are rare and if you find a very brief one most people don’t even bother reading it. People expect that they are able to use something at once.
Actually we can take that a lot further: Rewriting history has been the practice of every corporation or governmental body since written history was invented. The reason we say that history is written by the victorious is because it’s true.
Until Apple comes up with something else, then that will be the bestest most innovative mobile OS ever.
Why people still give any thought (and traffic) to what fanboys like these say is beyond me.
Edited 2013-02-20 11:32 UTC
Yeah. Exactly this. The original iphone screen size was the optimal screen size, until it wasn’t. PowerPC chips were always faster than intel, until they switched. Third party apps were a terrible idea, until the appstore.
It’s not “innovation” when all you do is stay minimalistic, it’s called “restraint”.
Minimalistic doesn’t infer simplicity neither does simplicity infer minimalistic. It’s just that it’s harder for a minimalistic thing to not by simple, but too often it’s not.
Can it?
The abstract concept of simplicity?
No, probably not.
A specific invention that works in a simple manner compared to previous inventions in the same field?
Yes, as long as it meets all of the other requirements ( no business process, no prior art, etc).
As everyone else has raised in the other comments, apple was not the first to create this kind of an interface, so it should not be patent-able.
I had just gotten a Nexus 4 and had to give it up (boss wanted it) so while I am awaiting for another one to make its way I have to use a spare iphone 4s. There is only one word to describe ios: CLUTTER. Utter and complete mess of the home screen. And you have to spend a good deal of time to make it usable (as per my specs). It definitively is not a device for me. I want to have a clean and empty home screen with very few shortcuts (phone, email, messaging and maybe time). Everything else should be tucked away in an organized location. Remember everyone complaining about bloatware in windows? ios reminded me of that. Disgusting!
By default (as in Factory fresh) there are only about 17 icons on the home screen. All of which are easily movable. Lets compare to Android 4.2: Every app installed ends up with 2 icons (one on the desktop, on in the app tray) and deleting the icon from the desktop doesn’t delete the app from the device (or even ask if that is what you meant.) That’s fine if you understand that’s the way it works, but not if you are a novice (or plain stupid as some other commenters have implied they are when it comes to iOS.)
Let’s then look at the app tray… how is that is any kind of order by default? New apps seem to randomly appear in the list (is it sorted in some specific order? I don’t know, I’ve never really taken time to look). Can you sort the icons? (Never tried.) It’s extremely unwieldy and confusing. Even the UI on the Skinned Android Samsung devices my kids have does a better job of arranging the installed apps that stock Android.
17 is way too much! Like I stated I prefer to have only shortcuts for core functions (phone, email, messaging). As for easily movable … easy movable where? on another home screen? Is that your idea of clean and organized … it is not to me. Creating folders just to get rid of that mess worked to some extend but not for all of them (f… newstand! not only you can’t get rid of it, it has an ugly icon, too)
Strange, but to me that is exactly how it should be. Very similar to notions that have been established in PC-s. Desktop shortcuts are, well ….shortcuts to the app and not the app itself. Everything else is confusing.
I guess I will this one to you to figure out, just like I had to waste couple of hours to get to somewhat clean home screen on my temp iphone.
Stock Android 4.2 has less than 10 icons on the home screen, and 5 of those are in the dock so appear on every screen.
Nope. Every app has 1 icon, in the app drawer. You have the option of copying icons from there to whichever home screen you want. Or, you can just leave them all in the app drawer and have blank home screens.
Depends on the launcher. For example, a long-press of a home screen icon in Go Launcher Ex gives you the option to:
– change the icon
– delete the icon from the home screen
– uninstall the app
Alphabetical by default. Again, depending on the Launcher used, you can change the sort order, choosing between options like:
– alphabetical
– order installed (newest first)
– order installed (oldest first)
– most often used first
New apps either appear in the list according to the sort order you selected, or at the very end of the list. Either way, they get a “new” badge attached so you can find them right away.
Seriously? You find an alphabetical list of icons (Android) to be confusing, but a random listing of icons (iOS) to be sublime?
Me thinks you haven’t actually used Stock Android 4.2.
As well as a load of giant widgets.
No, sorry – that is incorrect. If one installs an app using the Play store, one gets one icon on the Desktop and one icon in the app list/tray. This is on a Nexus 7, up to date, running 4.2.Whatever the current release is. It updated about a week or so ago.
The stock Android launcher. You understand we are talking about *stock* Android, right?
Please read and understand the complaint before replying.
I might actually look tonight. I know that as a casual user who didn’t really pay much attention, it wasn’t the order I was expecting (installation order), nor did it make much sense. I’ll admit I really didn’t bother looking in to it any further and just accepted that I’d need to scan through the icons to find the app I was looking for. Because, really, I work that way – I look for the icon, I don’t read the text on every app. I think that might just be the way my brain works (visual images are more important than words.)
On the stock 4.2 that is installed on the Nexus 7? Now I know you have never used a Nexus 7. This does *not* happen, you don’t gat any kind of indication that the app is “new” (unless that happened in the very last update, as I’m pretty sure I’ve not installed anything since then.) It does, however, happen in iOS 6.0 though.
Yes. Because iOS shows the apps in order of installation (if you let the screens naturally fill up) or at the next gap in your “home screens”. Again, I look for the icon, not the name of the app (being visually orientated, not textually orientated), so why would alphabetical be of any use to me? Also, in all versions of iOS up to 6.0, the app store closed at point of installation, and zoomed to the page with the new app. This would have a progress bar as part of the install process. It made it bloody obvious what was going on. Now in 6.x, the app downloads inside the app store app as well as on the home screens, and the app store doesn’t close. But then each new app has a “new” badge on the home screen till first launch and the app store has an “open” button when the install has completed, so again, it’s not exactly rocket science.
Yes I have. It’s well documented that I own a Nexus 7 on these forums, go ahead and search if you want proof. It’s got a lot better with the last release or two, but it can still be really unstable (mine has rebooted twice randomly since the last update, usually when my kids had left a lot of apps running in their accounts) and so I still only really use it for Youtube and brief web browsing. My kids use it more than me (and now they all have their own accounts on it, so I don’t need to worry as much about them messing with my account.) So, nope, wrong. If your phone/tables running is running a stock Android (as supplied directly from Google, with no enhancements or changes) has the extra features you claim with the stock install and launcher – lucky you, but it only goes to prove that a constant user experience is not given across all Android devices, even running stock images supplied by Google directly.
I’m seriously starting to think that Poe’s Law should be renamed Gruber’s Law.
Initial reaction before reading TFA: bullshit, that’s not an Apple innovation even in the loosest sense of the term. Take the text-based menu from DOS-based Novell networks (or welcome menu from any old BBS), replace the text labels with icons & use touch instead of the arrow key to activate options, and you have the iOS home screen. Hell, I’ve got an old PC kicking around somewhere with GEOS/GeoWorks installed on it, which boots to a screen showing… a simple grid of icons that represent “apps” – and that thing’s so old that it has a 286 CPU & the CMOS uses a AA battery pack.
Reaction after reading TFA: yep, about what I expected. Also, the Grube’ makes the common mistake of treating “less is more” as an absolute – the mere lack of features is not a compelling feature in and of itself (if it were, people would still be using AOL).
Quoth the Grube’:
“It^aEURTMs the simplest, most obvious ‘system’ ever designed.”
I might take that seriously, if it weren’t for the dozens of times that friends/relatives/etc have brought me their iProduct in a panic, because they somehow made all of their icons start jumping around like caffeinated Chihuahuas and can’t figure out how to make it stop.
Do you remember AOL? Its problem wasn’t a lack of features.
Even though I’m not a fan of Windows phone, It seems like its a great deal simpler and more obvious how to get and use information than the static icons of ios.
Despite my best efforts, yes. And now that I think about it, the iOS home screen is very reminiscent of the welcome screen from old versions of AOL, E.g.
http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b012877705ba497…
Do you remember AOL? To pick one random example, it’s mail client couldn’t even display the “From” name for incoming messages, and just showed the address instead – and it wasn’t capable of setting a “From” name for outgoing messages either. Even Pegasus Mail for DOS had that functionality.
Lack of features may not have been the problem that ultimately killed AOL as an ISP, but it certainly was a problem. Hell, even AOL themselves released released standalone applications that had more features than the equivalent functionality in the AOL client (E.g. AIM).
No it’s not. That looks more like Windows Phone 7/8 and Windows 8.
The one that has existed since before the Palm days?
One could argue that the Psion 3a had a fairly icon/text in a grid style layout (if one was going to be very pedantic.) But the icons in a Window was what Mac OS was doing in 1984, so who copied whom? I’m guessing Xerox possibly had something similar? It depends where you decide innovation and design originate in this specific area.
In 2001, IBM Research had a “smart watch” based on Linux. So Apple MUST be ripping off IBM. They OBVIOUSLY had the idea 12 years before Apple! Or maybe they’re ripping of Dick Tracy? In any case, Apple did something that most companies fail to do and that is to move toward simplicity. The tendency most people have is to overthink use cases and stick all sorts of crap on the screen. So I look at it as very much a zig to the conventional zag that other companies are copying to a degree.
And Nokia/Motorola ripped off Star Trek with their flip phones….