512 Pixels

Seth Godin, on a rough experience at the Genius Bar:

Every employee means well. Every employee is overwhelmed by incoming traffic, most from people who have already had their promises broken. Every employee has discovered that it’s easier to make a promise and pass it along than it is to either tell the truth or keep the promise.

The cascade starts with the product. When your brand makes promises it can’t keep, your overworked staff bears the brunt.

Unfortunately, Seth’s case isn’t super uncommon. The bit about the poor handoff between employees and departments within the Apple Store Seth describes was common when I worked at the Bar.

The Apple Store usually knocks it out of the park, but when it misses, it really misses.

Lukas Mathis:

The fact that the iPad only lets me see one app at a time often does not help me focus. Instead, it forces me to switch between apps constantly, thus preventing me from focusing on my task. Every time I have to deal with the iPad’s task switching, I’m interrupted.

For some tasks, letting applications take up the whole screen is useful. Applications like Garage Band or Writer make good use of the screen. But a lot of the time, allowing more than one app to occupy the screen can actually help people focus, because human tasks are often not as simple as computer tasks, and may require people to be able to see more than just a single application.

I found this to be especially irritating on the iPad while trying to write. Right now, for this article, I’ve got Safari (with Instapaper, Lukas’ site and Justin’s site all in separate tabs) and MarsEdit open (again, with several windows going).

Messy? Yes. Efficient? Yes.

[via Justin Blanton]

Brilliant.

Jeff Rock:

This brave new Apple is fast, agile and and above all, cool. Well, to be fair they’ve almost always been cool, but there’s something different this time. This isn’t like the iPod or the iPhone (or even the iMac for that matter.) The iPad marks a shift in the company. Before 2010 they had the luxury of waltzing into an existing market, picking a product, reinventing it and saying, “look how much better we made this.” With iPad, all that changed. Now that they’re creating markets Apple is finally forcing the competition to ask, “how are we going to keep up?” This is perhaps the first time a successful Apple product is in the lead and a generation beyond the also-rans. And they’re scaring the pants off of the competition.

[via Dave Chartier]

Microsoft:

10 years ago a browser was born.

Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.

Currently, worldwide usage of IE 6 is at 12 percent, with 34.5 percent of China’s web traffic being generated with the browser.

On his blog:

What Simperium will eventually offer is an easy-to-use platform for building apps that sync. I’m happy to announce that I’m now an advisor to and a (very minor) investor in Simperium. I haven’t worked on sync systems, but I am hoping that I can provide some insight to the Simperium team on building a developer platform and scaling out their backend systems.

If you’re a Simplenote user, expect the app to get better and better. If you’re developing an app that needs to sync, Simperium is building a platform you’ll want to use. If you rely on apps that sync, you’ll be using Simperium-powered tools before you know it. Fred, Mike, and their team are up to great things, and I feel privileged to be able to support them as best I can as they take their company to the next level.

This is great news for a great service.

Tom Poston, on Twitter about iPad 2:

This is Apple’s Empire Strikes Back: going from popular solo hit to enduring cultural dominance & change. So many parallels…

Apple’s UI guys are usually better than this.

Joshua Topolsky:

In this new world, Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to. There is no Mac vs. PC here – only “the future” versus “the past.” It won’t be a debate about displays, memory, wireless options – it will be a debate about the quality of the experience. Apple is not just eschewing the spec conversation in favor of a different conversation – it’s rendering those former conversations useless. It would be like trying to compare a race car to a deeply satisfying book. In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.

If you want to hear Josh, Marilyn and I talk forever about the new iPad and some clips of my daughter crying in the background, you’ll love this week’s Macgasm podcast.

Over on Minimal Mac:

I think if you were using and loving your iPad before today’s news, you can and should do so after it. It is still very much the magical and revolutionary 2 device it was when you woke up this morning. You know, when you launched the iPod app, fired up the latest episode of Enough, streamed it to your Airplay speakers, swiped through the New York Times, while you sipped free-trade coffee, and pondered what a blessed and wonderful life you had. A life filled with things you could only dream about as a kid and still foreign to 95% of the world’s population.