512 Pixels

Dr. Drang:

There’s been a tendency in recent years for reviewers of Mac and iOS software to heap praise on “opinionated design.” This phrase can usually be translated as “software that doesn’t allow much user customization.” For software that isn’t used often or isn’t used for long stretches at a time, a lack of customization options is no problem—it’s not worth spending a lot of time tweaking a program you spend little time with. But for bread-and-butter applications, like text editors, mail clients, calendars, and web browsers, tweaking the settings is as important as adjusting the driver’s seat in your car. You want to be comfortable with things you spend a lot of time with.

I know I’ve used that phrase in that way, but let’s get back to Herr Snowman:

Of course, the 2–3 things you want to change aren’t the same as the 2–3 things I want to change, so developers have to offer a multitude of options to cover all the bases. When presented with a long list of possible customizations, the possible reactions are

• Oh boy! Look at all the customizations I can do.
• Oh shit! Look at all the customizations I have to do.

The first thing I thought of when I read Drang’s piece was this screen in iOS 7:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple wanted iOS 7 to feel opinionated, but its design choices led to issues for many users, so the company keeps cramming more toggles in the Accessibility panel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Apple is taking the time to make sure as many people as possible can us iOS, regardless of any physical impairments.

Increasingly, however, I fear that Apple makes big, bold statements in its software without spending enough time in the real world first. iOS 7’s interface is certainly the most prominent example, iLife, iWork and OS X are littered with bad decisions.

Opinionated software can be great, as long as the opinions are well-considered. The myriad of UI tweaks available in iOS 7 feel like a failure of design.

Father Drang:

After using Macs exclusively from 1985 on, I reckoned it was time to light out for Linux territory near the end of 1996, just before Apple bought NeXT. But I didn’t leave because I thought Apple was about to go under, I left because the platform had turned to shit. The purchase of NeXT, and the courting of Be that came before it, was Apple finally admitting that it didn’t have the chops to fix an operating system that was in dire straits.

Back then, Apple’s inability to produce reliable software preceded a rapid drop in revenue. Today, in a weird, upside-down reflection of that time, Apple’s great financial success has preceded a rapid drop in software quality, and it’s hard to avoid drawing conclusions about cause and effect. The easy explanation, right or wrong, is that Apple’s success has spread it too thin and that the attention to detail we saw up until a few years ago has been lost.

There are few cars that I love every generation of, but the Golf is definitely one of them.

With Office for iPad being released this week and Microsoft reportedly backing away from its anti-iPad campaign, change is underway at the software giant.

There’s an obvious reason for this. The company’s new CEO Satya Nadella is a breath of fresh air in Redmond.

Clearly Office for iPad was in the works before Nadella was promoted to CEO in February. There’s evidence of Office for iPad that surfaced (hrm!) back in October 2013 and December of 2012. Eric Slivka’s Mac Rumors post in October suggests that Microsoft was working on bringing a “touch-first” version of Office to its own Windows platform before iOS.

It’s not hard to imagine the meeting where Steve Ballmer was shown the product and forbid it to be released.

And there — right there — is why Nadella is different from his predecessor.

But to see just how different he is from Ballmer, it’s important to look at the past.

Here’s a portion of Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld Boston in 1997:

In the keynote, Jobs shared Microsoft’s promise to release the same number of releases of Office for Mac as on the PC, and announced (to booing) that Internet Explorer would be the default browser on the Macintosh.

While those agreements have expired, the stress felt in the room is evidence of the rift between Cupertino and Redmond. To address this, Jobs said:

We’re shepherding some of the greatest assets in the computer industry. If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here.

We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude. We like their software.

So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy. This is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again.

I really think that Jobs believed this. The war was over years ago, but Microsoft just now let down their weapons. Nadella gets it; Ballmer didn’t.

Nadella seems to understand that for Microsoft to survive the post-PC era, it has to evolve. The idea of keeping a product from Apple’s platform just because of the logo doesn’t work anymore. Microsoft needs to make good apps backed by powerful cloud services.

That’s a future I welcome.

image via Federico

The epic burns aside — I chuckled at the Microsoft CEO’s use of the word magic — this exchange highlights something that’s bothered me for a while.

I really find Tim Cook’s approach to Twitter frustrating, despite the massive retweet numbers and blog posts spurred on by each tweet. The use of hashtags coupled with the grammatical errors make him seem unprofessional. While I appreciate that it’s probably Tim himself at the keyboard, having an employee or intern look over these things before they go out the door would be great.

This is the sort of thing that Microsoft needs to do to survive in the post-PC world: good, native apps on multiple platforms, powered by best-in-class cloud services.

Yesterday, my wife and I attended the funeral of a 8 year-old girl who recently lost her battle to brain cancer.

During the service, a nurse practitioner from St. Jude read this quote:

Children with cancer are like candles in the wind who accept the possibility that they are in danger of being extinguished by a gust of wind from nowhere. Yet, as they flicker and dance to remain alive, their brilliance challenges the darkness and dazzles those of us who watch their light.

While I can’t find the source of the quote online, the writer got it exactly right. I’ve never met a kid in the halls of St. Jude that’s isn’t special. They often touch more lives than anyone else. They inspire hope when most would succumb and crumble.

In a few weeks, we will be celebrating the five year anniversary of Josiah’s diagnosis. This sweet little girl was diagnosed about the same time. With her parents, we watched our kids grow up having MRIs and undergoing chemotherapy — doing things that would terrify most adults.

After the service, we spoke to Rick Shadyac, the CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising arm of St. Jude. After we caught him up on Josiah (who he’s met several times over the years) and chatted for a few minutes, he looked me in the eye and said:

We’re going to get back to the work of beating this thing.

I would march a million miles with that as my anthem. Our kids should flicker and dance, without fear. No more candles should be extinguished.

I was away this week, so Myke and Federico spoke about the things they always talk about—music services and video games. More specifically, advancements to iTunes Radio and Facebook buying Oculus.

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Confession time. I changed my short name on my Titanium PowerBook running OS X Jaguar and blew everything up. It took hours to get my data back where it belonged, and I had to do some nasty things to file permissions to make it all work again.

While the retired Genius in me gets the shakes thinking about this, Dan Frakes is here to help.

When I saw someone tweet a link to this article, I thought:

Apple already has a “Chromecast killer.” It’s AirPlay, and it’s been around for years.

Then I clinked the link and noticed the URL:

/apple-tv-air-concept/

The headline it ran with is certainly more inflammatory than the slug is, and I certainly fell for the bait.

Here’s Adario Strange lede:

With rumors surfacing that Apple may be working on a streaming television service with Comcast, it’s only natural that some observers are beginning to wonder what form Apple’s smart TV will take in the future.

To that end, Germany-based Curved has come up with a very realistic-looking take on what it might look like if Apple decided to launch an answer to Google’s Chromecast HDMI dongle.

The rest of his story is filled with some product mockups of an HDMI dongle. That’s it. There’s nothing about the features of the Chromecast, or of the Apple TV. Nothing about AirPlay, or the technology Google has developed in its product.

Sigh.

Apple’s newest Your Verse page is really interesting. While the first two essays (ads? articles?) were fairly product-centric, but this one reads more like a whitepaper on the subject. It follows the story of a high school senior named Mike Duffy, and discusses just one app — C3 Logix.

While I was down on the Your Verse campaign at first, if Apple has more of these rolled up its sleeve, I’m looking forward to them.

NPR’s Elise Hu:

Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR station on iTunes Radio.

This is exciting news. There is great content on NPR and other terrestrial stations. Bringing them to mobile devices is a great step.