The Fine Edge

Ben

With Apple’s recent mandate that all app submissions and updates support both Retina resolution and the iPhone 5 screen size starting May 1st, there a has been some talk about culling the app store of the large number of abandoned apps.

David Smith writes:

I do, however, wish that Apple would go farther with this and rather than just preventing further updates to old apps actually remove them from sale. On May 1st, when this policy goes into effect, it will have been 222 days since the iPhone 5 was introduced. Any app that hasn’t yet been updated to support its form factor starts to enter into the territory of abandonment. Indeed after that date they will be in a state of policy enforced abandonment.

This seems unnecessarily harsh, and makes the job of small developers, maintaining multiple apps, even more difficult. Many indie developers rely on residual income from established apps, to support new development. Switching back and forth between new development and updating old code for new devices can be jarring, causing slow downs on both sides of the switch. I say this while at the same time grumbling every time I download an app that doesn’t yet support iPhone 5 resolution.

Manton Reece responds with another possible solution:

Instead of being removed from sale, abandoned apps could switch to an archived state. They would no longer show up in top lists or even search, but could still be found with a direct link.

This is solves some of the issues with automatic culling and addresses the glaring problem of lost history which the internet suffers from without any help from Apple-enforced policy. Unfortunately, archived apps that are only accessible via a link, in practicality, could still be lost all too easily.

So I’d like to expand upon Manton’s suggestion with a few ideas that have been rattling around my head lately:

1. Once an app has become out-of-date with the current hardware support requirements, it should be labeled as abandoned until updated. Taking a hard line with verbiage is a great way that Apple can simply set the tone without actually doing much.
2. Abandoned apps could be automatically removed from lists and search results if they start to receive negative ratings. From then on they would only be accessible via a permalink (or company page) as Manton suggests.
3. Search results could be weighted by the device you are using quite heavily. Just like how on iPhone you don’t see iPad-only apps when searching the app store; on iPhone 5 you should be very unlikely to see apps that only support 3.5-inch screens.

By adopting a strategy like the one above, the App Store could strongly encourage developers to move to supporting the newest technology. The policy would also weed out abandoned apps in the store, improving consumer experience, while preserving Apple’s precious “X hundred thousand apps in the store” tally. All this could be had without actually losing the art and history of software in the App Store until the App Store itself goes away.

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Ben: Seriously, does anyone out there think about the kids that are growing up with the App Store software distribution model? When I want to wax nostalgic, I just go find an emulator and a game from the ‘80s or early ‘90s. What will adults do in 20 or 30 years when they want to reconnect with their childhood memories of playing Farmville or Sweatshop HD?

Bob:

Hidden between the child actors, smarmy stage-patter, and fourth-wall demolition in Samsung’s Galaxy S4 presentation was an idea that should disturb Apple fans: Samsung’s not copying Apple. Not because the S4 has a larger, denser screen than the iPhone 5, a very fast processor, and 2GB of RAM — those features should help the S4 succeed, but there’s nothing disturbing about the iPhone getting another worthy competitor. The bad news is that nobody, including Samsung, has learned from Apple how to deliver finished products.

Ben:

Samsung actually introduced interesting and technologically advanced features that they hope will lend their devices consumer appeal and increased usefulness. Eye tracking while viewing videos and/or checking out gardeners aside, many of the other features were genuinely worth taking a look at. And there were lots of them. Gloved hand operation, “air gestures,” simultaneous synced video capture from dual cameras, S Translate, adaptive sound EQ and color balance based on environmental sensors, Google Wave for Android ChatOn, screen and speaker sharing among S4 devices, and a myriad of other features and apps.

Bob:

Samsung’s marketing department has produced amazing cartoon demos of the new features. Some of these features look OK, though I’m skeptical about how well they’ll actually work. It’s even possible that one of them will become a standard feature of smart phones in the next few years—air gestures seem like a good idea in some situations. It would be silly to judge these features without using them first. Some of them are going to be lousy, and that’s fine. The problem is that I don’t think Samsung cares that some of these features are going to be lousy. If companies are going to copy Apple, I hope some of them start copying Apple’s philosophy rather than their products.

✍ Ben: The ‘throw it out there and see if it sticks’ philosophy is often followed by Google and others in the software world. It leads to a lot of products that gain a following but are then killed because the parent company can’t figure out how to develop the product into a core technology (cf. the Google Reader announcement).

Ben:

The philosophy of Apple product development has been discussed over and over again, but here’s my take on it. Make very few products. Make sure those products are useful and are amazingly well designed. Don’t design products based on a feature checklist, and don’t ship ultra cutting-edge technology that impinges upon the user experience or is extraneous to your core users. In short, make high quality products that are simple, evolutionary, and bring together software and hardware in a way that is usable by people.

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Bob: (N.B.: Apple’s had its share of half-baked technologies over the past ten years, but they’ve all been necessary, core technologies. iCloud and Maps are two outstanding examples.)

Frank X. Shaw, Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft, posted a tease about seven markets where Windows Phone is outshipping the iPhone. John Gruber wants to know which ones. Here are our best guesses:

• The Tandy 4000 User Group Market
• Dell Phone Support Center, Bangalore, India
• The National Association for the Protection of Squares and Rectangles
• The Collectible Russian Nesting Doll Market
• America Online
• Keilaniemi, Espoo, Finland
• Bill Gates House Tour Guide Market

Bob

There are lots of apps on iOS and Mac that try to look like real-world objects, and many of them are terrible. But we made an app called Ita last year, and its design takes cues from classic notebooks. That’s not (just) because we’re terrible designers. When the objects and the interface are right, making screens look like real-world stuff can be great. We settled on two principles to guide our design:

1. If we were going to choose to make a user interface resemble a real-world object, we should choose an object that looks really, really good, one that both provides a useful context for a user, and, ideally, one that provides an emotional connection to the app.

2. Skeuomorphic design should provide a context for the app, but shouldn’t limit how the app works. We didn’t want to get trapped by the conceit that the user is interacting with a real-world object when stepping out of that conceit would make the app work better.

✍ Ben: Number two is really important here. If you’ve ever used an audio app that makes the user fiddle with knobs — instead of easy to manipulate buttons and sliders — you know that this is a very real possibility when designing skeumorphically.

Apple’s own iOS apps are often skeuomorphic, or at least use skeuomorphic details for parts of their UI, and they’ve been widely critiqued elsewhere. The two most commonly derided skeuomorphic elements added to iOS in the past year are the shredder in Passbook and the reel-to-reel player in Podcasts. Let’s take a look at how these interface elements, contrary to popular opinion, are examples of a good use of real-world simulacra on iOS.

Podcasts’ reel-to-reel player calls up an iconic real-world object. It also provides useful information: as the user plays or scrubs through a podcast, the tape appropriately unwinds from one reel to the other, revealing a visual representation of the play state that doesn’t require reading the smaller digital player on the bottom of the screen.

What does the user give up for this interface? A big icon of the podcast feed must get pushed offscreen in order for the reel-to-reel to be visible. Until that icon gets moved, the app has no visible scrubbing capability. By contrast, in iOS’s Music app, you can scrub as soon as you start playing; here, that takes an extra swipe. That seems like an unfortunate trade-off, but it’s not strictly necessary: if the podcast icon were smaller, or were incorporated into the reel-to-reel — for example, as a label spinning on the reels themselves — the scrubbing capabilities would be immediately accessible. Perhaps they’re less accessible because scrubbing, sharing, changing the play speed, and setting a sleep timer are all advanced controls that don’t need to be immediately accessible.

The book pages that show up in iBooks for iPad are a similar, less successful, design element. Unlike the reel-to-reel’s tape, the book pages don’t change as the user progresses through a book. If they displayed more information, they’d be more useful and more fun. Instead, the pages are only a decorative element. That doesn’t make them bad, but interactive pages might make the app feel more cohesive.

Animations like Passbook’s shredder have lower costs, so it’s easier to make a case for them — the shredder only appears when a pass is deleted, so it’s not taking up valuable screen real estate. The animation is meant to delight and amaze the user. Sometimes design notes like that can fail — the animation could be too long, or get repetitive. It’s theoretically possible that creating animations like this means neglecting another, more essential, feature of the app. But these small details can give apps personality. When they’re successful, they’re great. Atebits’ Letterpress has a great deletion animation, made up of exploding pixels. It’s a great detail that reveals the care and personality that went into every element of the Letterpress. Passbook’s animation, though neat and fun, seems less successful, not because it looks like a real-world object, but maybe because it doesn’t fit in as well with the rest of the app.

This isn’t to say that skeuomorphism can’t be harmful. Sometimes that harm is a matter of taste, particularly with the polarizing stitched leather choices in some apps, or the potentially irritating ripped pages in Notes and Calendar. Following real objects too closely as a guide can lead to apps with all the limitations of real objects, while an incomplete implementation of a real-world object can feel strange — the Notes app feels very strange when the cursor shows up on top of the legal pad, and the mix of Helvetica for titles and dates feels out of place against the (horrifying) default font. Notes would be better if it were wholly skeuomorphic or not skeuomorphic at all; instead, it feels a bit cobbled together.

✍ Ben: An example of a limitation imposed by Skeumorphism in Notes.app is that if you have more than 11 distinct notes, their titles are occluded by a leather flap when in landscape orientation on iPad.

There are many variations of Steve Jobs quotes that say something like this: “Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.” Making apps look like real-world objects can be great; so can making apps look like gradients on a screen. Making a screen act like a real-world object, on the other hand, is more difficult to do successfully.

When making screens look like real objects changes how they work, we should consider whether the trade-off is worth it. But when skeuomorphism can provide a reference to a real-world object — particularly a beautiful one — while the user interface also takes advantage of all the ways screens are better than real-world objects, skeuomorphism has its advantages. In matters of beauty, we can agree to disagree whether any particular user interface is superior to another. It’s usability, not appearance, where skeuomorphism can break an interface.

✍ Disclaimer: This post should not be construed as an endorsement of the Chrysler Cordoba.

Ben

Well, here’s our first plug. CocoaConf Chicago is happening this weekend. If you don’t have anything planned and are in the vicinity for Friday and Saturday, you should check it out. There are a few spots still available. I’ll be giving a talk about prototyping iOS and Mac apps and covering some tools that are out there to help with the process.

CocoaConf, as a conference, has impressed me a lot. Usually conferences are pretty static — they provide roughly the same experience each time you attend. CocoaConf however, has improved at a rate that amazes me. Each one I’ve either attended or looked at the session schedule for, is better than the last. I’m looking forward to being part of their speaker lineup in Chicago and then again in San Jose (April 18-20). I think they’ve done a bang up job recruiting speakers and am happy to be part of a conference that features friends and great presenters like Mike Jurewitz, Matt Drance, Jonathan Penn, and Jaimee Newberry.

✍ Update: Slides and session notes from the talk are now available.

✍ This post was originally envisioned as a welcome to the new year post. We almost killed it, but figured it was worth writing anyway. It’s only March. Sweden celebrated New Years on March 1 until 1753. Gott Nytt År, friends.

Ben

• iPad Smart Case — Apple seems to be somewhat ashamed that they even make this product — it is referenced on some of the iPad product pages and conspicuously missing from others. It also strongly competes with many similar, nay almost identical, third party cases. But, and this is a big but, you can get it laser engraved with the very same tiny Helvetica characters you have on your iPad. Don’t look for an iPad Mini variant, though — Apple has apparently realized that it’s a horrible idea.

• iAd Gallery — This one is easy pickin’s. The app was updated to “support iOS 6” but didn’t even get enough love to support the new iPhone 5’s screen size.

• MacBook Air — Don’t cry. It’s inevitable. Maybe not this year, but if not, then next year. The Retina MacBook Pro will continue to decrease in weight and and product envelope size until the Air is an unnecessary product. And we all know that Apple doesn’t like unnecessary products unless that product is an iPad Smart Case.

Bob

• Non-retina MacBook Pro — The non-retina MacBook Pro will die long before the MacBook Air goes away. The Air is here to stay as long as there’s a market for low-priced, low-powered MacBooks. As the retina MacBooks get smaller, the Airs can get even smaller. If the Air keeps a standard resolution screen, it will have an advantage on cost and battery-life (or, since Apple often prefers weight savings to battery-life, on weight). An open question — and the non-retina’s lifeline — is whether the 13” MacBook Air can get enough storage to replace the 13” non-retina MacBook Pro as Apple’s best-selling laptop. I have a hard time recommending the entry-level 13” Air only because 128GB isn’t enough storage for most people. If the Air’s storage doesn’t see a bump, the non-retina Pro might see one last update this year.

Ben

• Apple Web Apps Discovery Page — Web apps are great, but Apple doesn’t care about them or seemingly even care about keeping up the pretense of caring about them. This isn’t to say that you can’t make stellar web apps for iOS. You can. Its just that Apple doesn’t care to market them for you. Some would say this is because they don’t get their 30%. I’d argue that it’s more likely that they don’t see it adding to platform desirability in the same way a native app does. Apple’s web app page hasn’t been updated since 2010. Just put it out of its misery already.

• 8 GB iOS Devices — Apple is limiting its users’ usage by only giving them a few gigabytes of space to fill with music, apps and video. Many high quality games clock in at a few hundred megabytes to over a gigabyte (FIFA 13 [1.48GB], Amazing Spiderman [829MB], Carcassonne [448MB]), leaving users with little room for any amount of music or video (cf. arguments about the 32GB Surface). 8GB devices should disappear and 16GB should be the new 8GB, with 32GB becoming the default for Apple’s flagship products. As Apple tries to keep costs down to drive worldwide sales this may not be feasible. But from a strictly user perspective, 8GB just isn’t enough to experience all of what Apple wants its users to do with their devices.

• Ping — Apple’s failed social network for music discovery and sharing seems to be that, failed. Maybe the right thing would be to kill it softly?

Why None of This Will Happen

Bob

Apple released Texas Hold’em in 2008, and updated it for the last time in September of that year. The game lasted on the App Store until November of 2011. I give the Apple Web Apps Gallery at least another year, in all its standard-resolution glory (nothing at Apple.com/webapps supports retina-resolution on the Mac). The iAd Gallery will, I expect, have a similar shelf life, unless iAds themselves go away. My speculation: the primary reason Ping died is that killing it made iTunes 11 easier to ship. Stand-alone apps and web galleries have no such dependencies, so there’s no advantage to killing them.

As far as storage goes: Apple’s lowest-end iPhone has 8GB of storage, and its lowest-end Mac has 64GB of storage. Both of these stats seem embarrassing to power users, but I’m not sure they’re more embarrassing in 2013 than they were in 2012. Apple could bump these specs—the company’s shown a willingness to cut its margins in order to sell products. But should they? Customers aren’t avoiding these devices because of their low storage capacity. If customers buying an iPhone 4S in 2013 are feature-conscious at all, they’ll buy an iPhone 5. If customers want more storage on their Macs, they can upgrade them—at time of purchase only, naturally. The student price for the low-end MacBook Pro is $1099, while the 256-GB 13” Air costs $1349 with Apple’s education discount. So the entry-level MacBook Pro, with its spinning rust, will likely continue to be Apple’s best-selling laptop in 2013.

Ben

Apple also seems to loathe killing products without having a knockout replacement available for them, and rightly so. The best time to kill a product is when there is a transition path for that product’s devoted customers to upgrade to a remarkable new product that Apple feels outshines and obsoletes the previous one. If you want an example of this, just look at the iPod Classic, which almost made our list, but fell outside the statute of limitations covering products that have had so many other years to be killed in that they cease to be fun to suggest. In the case of the iPod Classic, the storage sizes of the iPod Touch have never been large enough to obviate the need of some users to simply have their full music library available in Apple Lossless on a 2.5” x 4” rectangular solid in their pocket.

Bob

And inside that rectangular solid sits a tiny, tiny plate of spinning rust. Hard disk drives are incredibly hard to kill — it will be interesting to see whether Apple has a fully HDD-free laptop line-up while they’re still shipping hard drives in their iPods.

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Ben: You think people actually read all the way down to this “After the Cut” nonsense? [Too soon for meta content, I think —Bob]

Bob: [not kidding — cut this]